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BURN SURGERY IN DEVELOPMENT
A Brief Introduction to the Department of Burn Surgery, Xijing Hospital, Xi'an, China
Da-hai HU and Bi CHEN, Department of Burn Surgery, Xijing Hospital,
Fourth Military Medical University, Xi'an 710032, China

The department in Xi'an was founded by the famous professor, Wang Liang-neng, in 1995. It was one of the earliest Burn and Plastic Surgery departments in China. With our hard work for many years, the department was developed and established as a unique Plastic Surgery Centre with Plastic and Burn Surgery specialties of the People's Liberation Army in 1988. In the same year, it was authorised by the Chinese State Council to educate doctoral students. Following further development and expansion it was divided into a Burn Surgery department and a Plastic Surgery department in 1990.

As the biggest Burn Surgery department in the Northwest of China, we have treated over 5000 of both out-patients and in-patients, and succeeded in treating about 1000 severely burned patients - including the sucessful treatment of one critical patient with 98% TBSA burns (III° 68%) complicated with serious sepsis. We have emphasised the importance of burn wound management, and also paid more attention to applying plastic surgery techniques in burn surgery. Thus the deformity rates of treated patients have been reduced from 95.2% in the 1960s to less than 15% today. We lay special stress on reconstructing function as well as saving life in the early phase of burns, because we always consider the quality of life of burned patients, which needs to be improved afterwards.
There is a strong clinical team composed mainly of three professors (one is a tutor of the Doctoral Degree Programme, and three are tutors of the Master's Degree Programme), two associate professors and seven attending doctors, working in the department. We have attached primary importance to training young doctors. So far, twenty-two postgraduates including eight doctoral students have graduated from our department. With great support from Dr George Cherry, Chairman of the Wound Healing Programme of the Wound Healing Institute at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford, UK, we have sent five young doctors there to learn advanced scientific techniques and knowledge. Four of them have now returned after finishing the training programme and research work and, at present, one doctor is still studying in the Wound Healing Institute. So there has been a very friendly and close co-operation between the Wound Healing Institute and the Burn Surgery department for many years. Dr Cherry and all his colleagues in England have contributed very much to the development of the Burn Surgery Department. In addition, we have established academic relations with some Departments in Canada, the United States of America, Switzerland, Japan and Australia.

The main academic research directions of our department have focused on skin grafting and wound healing. We possess a well-equipped laboratory for wound healing studies. Many research projects have been done in the laboratory, some of which have achieved advanced national level awards, for example 'SV40 transformed human keratinocyte line'; 'cloning and culture of hEGF, hbFGF gene-transfected keratinocytes'; 'the effect of PCNV4-TGFb1 as a nucleic acid vaccine on wound healing and scar formation'; 'a study of phenotypic changes of fibro-blasts from burn wounds in vitro'; 'a study of the manufacture and clinical application of composite skin' etc.

Fifteen scientific achievement awards have been obtained, including the following:

In scientific studies we have been financially supported by three Funds, from which we obtained twelve grants in total:

Several important academic conferences have been successfully held by our department in Xi'an:

Our department is an excellent burn unit and is still developing. With our hard work, it should obtain more achievements in the future. We would like to welcome you to our department and show you our ongoing work.