Source : Perth Now news
A fun day in the sun turned into an agonising ordeal for 12-year-old Clare Nicholson, who was left so blistered by severe sunburn that she required treatment in hospital.
An alarming rise in cases such as Clare’s prompted Perth Children’s Hospital clinical nurse consultant for burns Tania McWilliams to issue a stark warning to parents to make sure their children covered up.
“I’ve worked in burns for 28 years and I would say this is the worst year we’ve seen for sunburn,” she said.
“Over the last two months, we’ve noticed a large increase in the number of patients presenting with severe sunburn.
“The message I’d really like to get out is it is a preventable injury.”
PCH figures show that in the past three months, 40 patients were referred to the hospital’s total care burns unit for sunburn, compared with 29 for the same period last year — a 38 per cent increase.
Ms McWilliams said clinicians had also noticed a worrying rise in the severity and size of burns.
Clare spent a day with friends enjoying rides at Adventure World in Bibra Lake in December.
She put on sunscreen in the morning and even re-applied it, but admits jumping into the water too soon after that.
And she spent a long time waiting in lines while standing in the full sun, with her back and shoulders exposed by a bikini top.
“It really hurt when I was trying to go to bed, like, I couldn’t move,” she said.
“Also, I was really cold and I was under four blankets, but my shoulders were really hot.
“But the next day, that was probably the worst, because that’s when all the blisters started coming up.”
That was when Clare’s mum, Erin, decided she needed medical attention.
They sought help from an urgent care clinic, which referred them to the emergency department at PCH.
Clare said she did not want any other child to go through the same pain, which was the worst she’d ever experienced.
At the hospital, nurses gave her pain relief and popped the blisters.
“It really hurt and it just didn’t stop,” she said.
“I thought it would get kind of better after a little while — but I think it just got worse.”
“There were heaps of small blisters, but there was one main blister that was the biggest of them all.
“They wrapped me up a lot with a bunch of bandages, and then sent me home.
“But sleeping was so painful.”
Later, she had to return to the burns unit for special baths to scrape off all the dead skin.
“And that hurt a lot — that probably hurt more than the actual sunburn,” she said.
Ms Nicholson said she had been shocked by how quickly and easily Clare was so badly burnt.
“I’d never seen blisters that big,” she said.
“She was really sick and poorly as well.”
Ms McWilliams said children needing treatment for sunburn were presenting with large areas of redness, or with blistering and subsequent skin loss.
“Often it is a matter of the appropriate dressings, but some patients are sustaining some burns that are severe enough to need inpatient admission and treatment,” she said.
“These are very painful injuries, and they can be prevented with some protection.”
Patients fell into two main groups — infants and older, school-aged children.
And older children were either forgetting to wear sunscreen or to reapply it.
Ms McWilliams urged parents to stick with indoor activities when the UV rating was high.
And if children did go out in the sun, to make sure they wore a long-sleeved rash vest, hat and sunglasses as well as sunscreen.
The warning comes amid growing concerns about a recent social media trend for teens to deliberately get sunburnt to achieve tan lines on their skin.
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