A Survey of YouTube Videos as a Source of Useful/Unuseful Information in the Field of the Prevention and Management of Burn Injuries: A Cross-sectional Analysis of the English Language Content

Abstract

Abstract The study was designed on whether YouTube videos are useful as an information resource in the field of burn injury prevention and management. Current literature on the educational content and quality of burn-related first-aid videos on YouTube was reported as inadequate and inaccurate. However, the quality of YouTube videos on various medical and clinical topics has been the subject of many previous studies, and there has been increasing evidence that the content ratio of usefulness was higher than that of nonuseful. While hours and even minutes in burn injuries are as precious as gold in terms of outcomes, it would be a significant loss not to use the most popular and easily accessible free social media platform of our time as a tool that can contribute to the prevention of burns and raise awareness. Analysis was conducted with the remaining 96 videos from 240 videos obtained from YouTube, according to possible search terms and exclusion of videos according to predetermined criteria. The Global Quality Score (GQS) and modified DISCERN (m.DISCERN) tools were used to assess the quality and reliability of the videos. Viewer engagement metrics and video properties were also investigated according to the usefulness criteria (eg, video length, duration on YouTube, topic contents, source uploads, reliability, and quality). Finally, it was revealed that nearly 80% of the YouTube videos contained information in the field of the prevention and management of burn injuries deemed useful in this study, comparable to the other medical disciplines’ reports in the literature.