World Best Paediatric Burn Specialist

Australia

The Burns Service of Western Australia (BSWA) is world-renowned leader in the field of burns injury and education. Professor Fiona Wood has been at the centre of leadership of BSWA since 1991. The BSWA provides a world-wide multidisciplinary acute, rehabilitative and reconstructive burn service for infants, children, adolescents and adults.

The service is based at Fiona Stanley Hospital and Princess Margaret Hospital for Children. The research supported by the Fiona Wood Foundation enables the burns care teams at the BSWA to be global leaders in the delivery of a service of excellence supported by evidence and driven by research.

Princess Margaret Hospital for Children

The PMH Total Care Burns Unit provides a world-wide multidisciplinary acute, rehabilitative and reconstructive burn service for infants, children and adolescents throughout WA. The burns team consists of experienced dedicated burns nurses, doctors, occupational therapists, physiotherapists, psychologists, dieticians and play therapists. Each year approximately 350 children in WA sustain severe burn injuries requiring inpatient care within our unit, and we also conduct approximately 6,700 reviews for children who require our specialist burns outpatient and telehealth care for minor burn injuries and long term scar management. We are committed to the implementation of our most current research at both the adults and childrens hospitals in Western Australia.

About Dr Fiona Wood

Fiona Wood, British-born Australian plastic surgeon who invented “spray-on skin” technology for use in treating burn victims.

She graduated from St. Thomas’s Hospital Medical School in London in 1981 and worked for a time at a British hospital. She became Western Australia’s first female plastic surgeon, after earning her fellowship from the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (RACS) in plastic and reconstructive surgery (1991). In 1992 Wood became head of the burn unit at Royal Perth Hospital (RPH), which moved its facilities to Fiona Stanley Hospital in 2014. She also served as a clinical professor at the School of Paediatrics and Child Health at the University of Western Australia and directed the McComb Research Foundation (now the Fiona Wood Foundation), which she founded in 1999.

Dr Wood’s specialty

From the early 1990s Wood focused her research on improving established techniques of skin repair. Her spray-on skin repair technique involved taking a small patch of healthy skin from a burn victim and using it to grow new skin cells in a laboratory. The new cells were then sprayed onto the patient’s damaged skin. With traditional skin grafts, 21 days were necessary to grow enough cells to cover extensive burns. Using spray-on skin, Wood was able to lower that amount of time to just 5 days. Wood patented her technique and in 1999 cofounded a company, Clinical Cell Culture, to release the technology worldwide. The company went public in 2002, with much of the money it generated being used to fund further research. Her technique was considered a significant advance in clinical skin repair, helping to reduce scarring in patients with extensive burns and speed their rate of recovery.

In October 2002, survivors of bombings in Bali, Indonesia, were evacuated to RPH, where Wood led a team that was credited with saving the lives of 28 of those patients, some of whom had suffered burns over more than 90 percent of their bodies. In March 2007 Wood also cared for several victims of an airplane crash at Yogyakarta Airport, in Indonesia.

Wood received the Order of Australia in 2003 for her work with the Bali bombing victims. In 2005 she was honoured as Australian of the Year.