Our Blog: Equipping & Empowering

If you ever find yourself in an emergency situation, whether it's an active shooter event at work or a car accident on the interstate, we cannot emphasize enough the importance of a fast response. 

Sadly, there are a lot of myths floating around out there that can squelch a civilian first responder's confidence and even hinder their ability to provide life-saving medical treatment. We want to debunk those myths in hopes of empowering you to take action, respond, and save lives.

Tourniquets like the CAT (Combat Application Tourniquet) have been around for decades, but the conception of tourniquet application was invented long before that. 

It's no surprise, then, that over such an extensive timeline, rules about applying tourniquets have changed in ways big and small. Each tweak of the process and adjustment to protocol has been the result of dedicated research and testing, and we can therefore confidently adhere to the changes knowing that we are providing the best emergency medical response that we are capable of providing in that moment.

Any time information changes, confusion can form and misinformation can spread. Many times, people fail to realize anything has changed at all. To squelch some of the confusion, we're addressing some commonly overlooked or unknown best practices for tourniquet application.

While we typically spend a great deal of time speaking about responding to workplace violence or school shootings, there are many workplace injuries that occur unrelated to acts of violence or active shooter scenarios. 

Manufacturing and industrial facilities are accident-prone to say the least, and with forklifts, heavy crates, and assembly line equipment, risk is ever present. 

If you are thinking "It would never happen at my facility," you're wrong. Rather than passively hoping for the best, it's time to be proactive about facing potential injuries at your industrial facility.

First aid kits have their place — like maybe when you get a paper cut or tear a hangnail — but the bandaids and antiseptic wipes in your basic first aid kit will not stop severe bleeding or help you treat any other kind of life-threatening injury.

It's time to increase your preparedness. Instead of preparing for basic first aid, train for emergency medical response, especially bleed control. After all, if you're ready to effectively handle the big things, then responding to the little things like minor incisions are second nature. Everybody wins when you're prepared to respond to severe hemorrhage but only have to clean up a scraped knee on the playground.

Better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it, they say. That couldn't be more true in the context of medical kits. Let's look at 5 specific items you should always have in your emergency medical kit.

Two minutes. Maybe three; four if you're lucky — that's all the time you have to treat a serious hemorrhage before it's fatal. The fact that a person can bleed out in just two to four minutes is proof of how important it is to know how to stop massive bleeding.

While reading a blog article cannot adequately equip you to treat a life-threatening injury like severe hemorrhage (you need hands-on, scenario-based training for that), the information in this article provides a good starting point.