The Burns Surgery Unit in Mulago Hospital is a specialised area for patients sufferring from burn calamities. Across the country burns care is delivered in a variety of ways, depending on the infrastructure available to the burns service.

Increasingly major injuries are being centralised into specialised paediatric or adult burn Wards, where a separate team of burn surgeons offer a 24 hour availability. The purpose of the service provisionally is to allow the survival of burns victims and return them to society with an unchanged potential, this can rarely be fully achieved, in terms of maximising both functional aesthetic recovery along with psychological support, for both patient and their family, but it remains the goal

A great deal of burns surgery involves liasing with team members to ensure the patient gets timely co-ordinated intervention, which may be surgical or nursing based or physical therapy based. There is the constant risk of having to deal with the death of patients, sometimes after they have been with the burns team for a considerable period of time and relationships have been built up with the patient and their families.

In someway this is not dissimilar to palliative care, but on the other hand the rewards of a recovered and recuperated patient are substantial, as are the long-term relationship built up with patients, for whom ongoing reconstruction maybe a feature of the patient/surgeon relationship for many years.

Outpatient burns care is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The Burn Treatment Center features a positive pressure isolation room and hydrotherapy facility. The Unit operates under the Uganda Burns and plastic Surgery Institute (UBPSI), Mulago Hospital.

The Unit admits about 260 patients with major burns and 100 patients with major soft tissue infections per year. Most of the extensive burns in UBPSI are sent to the center for care. Outpatient burn care is available 24 hours a day, with an aver age of 1,800 patient visits per year. The Unit features a positive pressure isolation room and state-of-the-art hydrotherapy facility