CHILDREN who suffer burns around Bonfire Night may feature in a North-East "video nasty" designed to shock other youngsters into avoiding danger.

Doctors who work at Royal Victoria Infirmary's (RVI) children's burns unit are looking to recruit injured youngsters - with their parents' permission - to feature in a DVD for schools.

The aim is to develop a hard-hitting teaching aid which can be shown in North-East schools before next year's Bonfire Night.

Youngsters will be shown horrific burns caused by fireworks and bonfires, and children will be urged to stay away from blazes and avoid playing with fireworks.

The DVD will also stress the importance of early treatment for injuries, especially the need to get injured limbs immersed in cold water as soon as possible to reduce damage to tissue.

The Newcastle doctors who intend to make the DVD recently highlighted the poor record of North-East youngsters when it comes to firework and bonfire injuries.

A study was carried out by RVI plastic surgeons last year to see if there were differences in injuries between the North and the South. It showed that children in the Newcastle area were much more at risk of burns during November than their counterparts in Sussex.

North-East youngsters have more chance of being burned by bonfire-related accidents than their southern counterparts and accidents are clustered around November rather than spread out throughout the year, as they are in Sussex. The average age of a bonfire victim in the North-East was ten, three to five years younger than surgeons expected.

Specialist registrar Tania Cubison said: "We want to produce an inter-active DVD which children will watch in schools next year.

"The idea is to make it into an educational game which children will remember."

Many bonfire injuries involved younger children "messing around" near fires or playing near hot embers the following day, she said.

Miss Cubison said it was important that parents should talk to their children about the dangers of playing with fireworks or going near bonfires.

"They need to know where their children are and what they are doing at this time," she added.

A separate research project, which is looking at the best way to treat severe scalds, is continuing at the Newcastle hospital.

The team is comparing the use of innovative "spray-on" skin, grown from a tiny fragment of the patient's own tissue, with more expensive products.