Vanderbilt University Medical Center is providing bleeding control training courses across the region in an effort to educate the public on what they can do in an emergency to potentially save a life.
“Stop the Bleed” is part of a national awareness campaign through the Department of Homeland Security, the American College of Surgeons and the Hartford Consensus.
The course aims to teach the average citizen how to control bleeding until emergency personnel arrive.
“We are teaching people to be immediate responders until first responders arrive on the scene of an incident, be it for a catastrophic mass event or an isolated workplace injury,” said Cathy Wilson, MSN, RN, Vanderbilt trauma outreach/injury prevention coordinator. “We know people are dying from uncontrolled hemorrhage when it could have been prevented. Stop the Bleed gives people tools for their toolkits so they know what to do if someone has uncontrolled bleeding.”
Since the program’s inception in 2016, VUMC has trained hundreds of school nurses, teachers, school resource officers, preschool teachers and staff, day care centers and more, and will continue to offer the free, one-hour course to interested groups throughout the region.
“We really want to train as many people as we can,” Wilson said. “The only thing more tragic than loss of life is a loss of life that could have been prevented.”
A person can die in as little as five minutes or less due to uncontrolled bleeding, but proper bleeding control methods — including hand techniques, dressings, and tourniquets — can make all the difference.
Course participants learn how to apply compression, pack a wound and use a tourniquet. At the conclusion of the course, the training site receives a kit complete with gloves, gauze, a tourniquet and instructions to use in the event it is needed.
For more information or to schedule a training, contact catherine.s.wilson@Vanderbilt.Edu.
