Striving Deadly: Extending Psychosocial Care for Young People with Burn Scars in North Queensland

Research indicates that young people with burns are at an increased risk of manifesting negative life trajectories during adolescence. This has the potential to impact on many aspects of their life including psychological wellbeing, engagement in education and career and even social contributions. Despite extensive involvement by hospital staff through follow up care, many children with burns experience considerable ongoing physical, social and emotional challenges that impact their engagement in their everyday occupations.

Striving Deadly is a therapeutic outdoor adventure initiative for survivors of burn injury, which provides an extension of psychosocial care for children beyond the boundaries of the Townsville University Hospital (TUH) walls. Therapeutic goals of the program include access to peer support, challenge by choice experiences, and to build resilience through self-reflection.

Learnings from the delivery of Camp Oz, a burns camp delivered annually for 12 years by the Queensland Children’s Hospital and PCYC Bornhoffen in South East Queensland, were contextualised to accommodate the specific needs of running the program in North Queensland.

In recognition of the high proportion of Indigenous participants, Striving Deadly was named by Trevor Prior, TUH’s Cultural Practice Coordinator, with the aim of facilitating cultural safety within the program. It was a chosen to acknowledge that the children were striving to be ‘deadly’ or a ‘better version’ of themselves.