Erin Hanlin, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at Duke, has received a one-year, $92,000 Pilot Research Grant from the Emergency Medicine Foundation to identify—and address—the barriers to evidence-based pediatric burn care in non-burn centers across central North Carolina.
The project will leverage the existing network of the Central Carolina Healthcare Preparedness Coalition (CCHPC), which spans a diverse group of hospitals, including trauma centers, community hospitals, and critical access facilities. Of these, only one—UNC’s Jaycee Burn Center—is a designated burn center.
The study brings together a multidisciplinary team that includes Duke Emergency Medicine faculty and Dr. Emily Greenwald and Dr. Corrie Chumpitazi from the Duke Department of Pediatrics, as well as Dr. Booker King, Medical Director of the Jaycee Burn Center at UNC. Additional national experts from the University of Louisville, University of Utah, and the American Burn Association will provide guidance.
The grant will support the first phase of what Dr. Hanlin hopes will be a larger, long-term effort. In this initial stage, Dr. Hanlin and the team will study the barriers and facilitators that impact whether non-burn centers are able to follow evidence-based pediatric burn care guidelines.
“It’s not enough to know what works,” Dr. Hanlin said. “We need to understand why proven treatments and processes aren’t being adopted. Sometimes it's lack of knowledge, but often it's more complex—systems-level issues, resource constraints, or process barriers.”
To better identify these challenges, the team will engage directly with stakeholders from regional hospitals through a “co-design” approach—collaborating to both diagnose gaps and develop interventions tailored to each hospital’s needs. Future phases of the project will focus on implementing and scaling these interventions across the region.
Dr. Hanlin’s interest in burn care stems from her training at Brooke Army Medical Center, one of the largest adult burn centers in the country. “I saw firsthand how challenging burn care is, especially for providers who aren’t based in burn centers,” she says. “That challenge becomes even greater when the patient is a child.”
After completing her military service, Dr. Hanlin joined Duke and began working with the CCHPC, a regional coalition focused on improving healthcare system preparedness for disasters and emergencies. “This pre-existing network presented the perfect opportunity to explore how we can improve pediatric burn care regionally,” she says.
Dr. Hanlin’s work could not only improve outcomes for pediatric burn patients in North Carolina but also serve as a scalable model for other regions seeking to enhance emergency care for low-frequency, high-risk conditions.