Improvised Part 4: Wound Packing

It’s very hard to free think in stressful situations.

The more you get used to looking around in your environment for items you can co-opt to use in an emergency, the quicker you will be able to improvise if you have to. We set out to use as many items as we could from a typical hotel room to provide emergency casualty care.

It’s always best to have proven, dedicated medical equipment in an emergency, but at some point in your life, you will be someplace where you don’t have that equipment or don’t have enough supplies and equipment. That’s when we improvise. This is one video of a 10-part series.

Packing a wound stops bleeding both because of the mechanical pressure on the bleeding blood vessel as well as encouraging clotting. Here, towels are cut into strips for improvised wound packing and packed tightly into the wound to generate pressure and the fabric will provide an absorbent material for clotting.

The techniques posted here have some evidence and proof of concept to support their use in an emergency when better materials simply aren’t available.