New Wilderness Medical Society (WMS) guidelines for Care of Burns in the Wilderness
Posted: November 10, 2025 Filed under: First Aid, Medical | Tags: burn, firstaid, medical-standard, Wilderness First Aid, Wilderness Medical Society Leave a commentWilderness Medical Society Clinical Practice Guideline on Care of Burns in the Wilderness (You may need to be a member to subscribe.)
New Burn Care are guidelines for wilderness care, meaning this is the new standard in wilderness burn care:
Standards are a confusing issue in outdoor recreation. Standards can be created by your own organization, which only apply to you, but third parties think they are protecting you (rarely successful), and by how the world works. Standards are the lowest acceptable level of doing or not doing something as seen or reviewed by a reasonable person.
That means that a standard is the lowest level of acceptable doing something (or not doing something).
A standard is how you are going to be measured in the courtroom. Did you operate or perform at the level of the standard? If you did not, you are probably going to be found negligent, absent a defense, and writing a check.
Medical standards are nonexistent. Physicians are smart enough to know that creating a standard creates lawsuits. Creating standards also limits creativity. Being creative, not following the standard, can guarantee a lawsuit if someone is injured, so why be creative? Physicians do create guidelines. It gives other physicians and, in this case, first aid providers the best knowledge available at the time, knowing that not everyone may be able to meet the guidelines, and care is going to change, improve, and hopefully get better.
That is why you always need to be aware of any new standard, no matter who or how it was created. You may be held to that standard. In this case, because the New Wilderness Medical Society (WMS) knows what it is doing, they have not created a standard but a guideline. If you don’t follow the advice provided in the guideline, you have not breached the standard of care.
You can use this information to fight claims that you violated a standard, arguing that a group of physicians who specialize in the first aid in the wilderness have this guideline. Since the guideline was made by physicians, after months or even years of research, you were not negligent when you did not follow the “standard” created by another group.
These current burn guidelines have not changed much in how we practice burn treatments; they have just been put together for first aid providers in wilderness settings.
One thing you should always be aware of, how the words used in a guideline are defined. Wilderness, as defined by the New Wilderness Medical Society, may have a different definition from how the US Forest Service or the rest of the federal government defines wilderness. You can find the New Wilderness Medical Society definition of wilderness here: The Definition of Wilderness Medicine & Wilderness EMS.
You can find most of the New Wilderness Medical Society guidelines in Wilderness Medical Society Practice Guidelines for Wilderness Emergency Care; however, several guidelines have been created and updated since this book was published in 2006.
To stay up to date, to see research leading to new first aid guidelines, and to be able to read and stay current on all of the guidelines, you need to become a member of the Wilderness Medical Society (WMS).
Why Is This Interesting?
Because if you are providing first aid outside of the community, cities, towns, or the EMS area of operation, this will be one of the criteria used to judge how well you did.
Be prepared to defend what you did using the guidelines based on how your situation varied from the criteria the guidelines were developed for, if necessary.
First of all, take care of someone burned, wherever you find them.
To read more articles on Standards and Guidelines, see:
So, if you write standards, you can then use them to make money when someone sues your competitors.
Trade Association Standards sink a Summer Camp when the plaintiff uses them to prove the Camp was negligent
ACA Standards are used by the Expert for the Plaintiff in a lawsuit against a Camp
Plaintiff uses standards of ACCT to cost defendant $4.7 million
So, if you write standards, you can then use them to make money when someone sues your competitors.
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Jim Moss
I represent Manufacturers, Outfitters, Guides, Reps, Colleges & Universities, Camps, Youth Programs, Adventure Programs, and Businesses.
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Jim is the author or co-author of six books about the legal issues in the outdoor recreation world; the latest is Outdoor Recreation Insurance, Risk Management and Law.
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