Background on our online Tactical Casualty Care courses For years students have asked about the feasibility of teaching the tactical first aid, or Tactical Casualty Care courses, outside of the Pacific Northwest. Unfortunately, to put on the class takes a …
Knowing the quantity of blood loss helps estimate the likelihood of shock Having a sense of how much blood a trauma patient “spilled” on the ground can be very helpful for understanding and estimating the casualty’s potential for shock. Unfortunately, …
Once a casualty’s massive hemorrhage is controlled, rescuers must turn our attention to the rest of the M-A-R-C-H pneumonic, specifically, to hypothermia prevention. Does the casualty have an open airway, or do they need help maintaining their airway? How are …
In our race to use tourniquets for controlling hemorrhage, we often lose sight of the value of good direct pressure as a hemorrhage control technique. Proven commercially available tourniquets are almost always going to be better options for controlling significant …
An OPS Core Helmet or Cairns Fire Helmet used to stop junctional hemorrhage with two CAT tourniquets. Proof of concept of a junctional hemorrhage tourniquet idea first suggested by Full Spectrum Training, now proven with doppler ultrasound.
Recent news articles describe many cases of the public placing “tourniquets” without windlasses on injured individuals to stop bleeding. However, if you look a little deeper, most of those well-intentioned “tourniquet” applications weren’t actually tourniquets at all and may endanger …