Burn Survivors’ Experience of Core Outcomes during Return to Life: a Qualitative Study

Abstract

 Introduction: Burn is one of the main and common health problems that face the victims with significant challenges in their lives. The main purpose of caring and rehabilitating these people is returning them to their previous life situation. Thus, the present study was conducted with the purpose of determining the experience of burn survivors with regard to returning to life in order to be able to obtain new concepts of acceptable implications in the present cultural and religious context. Methods: The present study is a qualitative study that was conducted using qualitative content analysis and in-depth unstructured interviews with 15 burn survivors in 2012 and 2013 in Tabriz. Results: During the process of qualitative analysis, the content of the category "balance", as the core essence of the experience of participants, was extracted according to three sub-categories: a- the physical integration (physiological stability, saving the affected limb), b-connecting to the life stream (self-care, getting accustomed, normalization), and c- return to the existence (sense of inner satisfaction and excellence). Conclusion: The results of this study confirmed the physical, psychological and social scales introduced by other studies. Also proposed the concept "return to the existence", that can be measured by the emergence of a sense of inner satisfaction and excellence in the individual, as one of the key and determinant scales in returning the victims of burn to life.

Keywords: Outcome, Burn survivors, Return to life, Qualitative study, Iran