🕖 Reading/Viewing Time, 5 minutes
Moving a casualty without dedicated equipment is incredibly difficult. Humans are hard to carry. They do not fit into our hands well like a barbell or a hammer would – their limbs are floppy and they tend to bend in the middle at the pelvis, endangering the backs of rescuers and slowing the process down to unacceptable levels. By using tools in our environment, we can learn to carry casualties quickly and effectively.
Untrained rescuers resort to grabbing ankles and wrists, and then having to heft the casualty up higher when they bend in the middle. It is inefficient and definitely makes you look like a rookie. Most purpose-built carry tools assume you have them.
Chairs don’t make that assumption and you can find them everywhere.
A standard chair — folding, office, dining — can be used as a makeshift litter when no stretcher or litter is available. The geometry of a chair distributes casualty weight differently than a manual drag or carry, reducing strain on the rescuer and providing better control and comfort for the the patient during movement.
This brief video demonstrates chair-carry techniques applicable in mass casualty events, workplace emergencies, and tactical environments where improvisation is the only option.
If you’re evacuating casualties from an office setting, you can really move out with a casualty in a rolling office chair. Rolling chairs are among the most underrecognized evacuation assets in workplace and active violent incident response. Best control still uses two rescuers — one pushing and one steering, or it’s easy for the chair to get away from you.
In this video, students in an in-person class demonstrate using cheap, foldable chairs as litters to carry casualties. Once the casualty is seated in the chair, rescuers can bend down, using their legs, and lip the casualty holding the chair legs, which fit our hands remarkably well.
This video was taken at an in-person Crisis Medicine Complete Tactial Casualty Care course. Can’t attend an in-person course? Consider training on-line with us..
