This is a part of the podcast series from the Model Systems Knowledge Translation Center on Returning to School After Burn Injury. Haig Yenikomshian and Sarah Stoycos discuss the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to helping a child return to school after a burn injury. 

I think an interdisciplinary team is important to get back to school because so many of us have expertise in different fields of burn recovery. For instance, as a surgeon, I'm looking at the wounds, I'm looking at the scars, and I'm thinking about how I can fix those problems to help. But I rely on our psychologist to help with the psychosocial. I rely on the child life to help navigate being an adolescent and going back to school … the occupational therapist for hand therapy. It only works if all of us do it together.

We work together as a team and so, you know, the physical therapists, occupational therapists, surgeons, nurses and myself all work together when working with a child or a family or any patient on our unit. And so it's not uncommon that nursing or PT or OT may call me and say, hey, this family is having a lot of anxiety about going back to school. Can you come talk to them? Especially at the outpatient stage. So the work in terms of the referrals that are made to me, but also the ways that we work with the child is very interdisciplinary. So I try to contextualize any of the information or work that I'm doing with the child and the family within the knowledge of what their medical status is, what their recovery is, what their functional limitations and abilities are.

And having that info from the surgeons and nursing and physical and occupational therapy helps me better tailor what are some of the challenges or more emotionally stressful encounters that the child may have to then tailor where I may kind of focus my attention. And then aside from that, I, again, I, I think the psychologist role, it's really important since there aren't, there's so few psychologists and we have more peer support networks and community-based resources that a big part of my role in addition to working with the burn team is working with the community to make sure that the child and family are connected.

 Visit https://msktc.org/burn and get the answers you need from experts who conduct innovative and high-quality research, provide patient care, and work to improve the health and overall quality of life for people with burn injury. That’s https://msktc.org/burn.