Improvised Part 9: Wound packing neck

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.

Hotel hand towels and sheets for an improvised neck wound packing bandage.

Packing a wound controls bleeding because of the mechanical pressure on the point of bleeding. To maintain hands-off pressure, you need a wound packing bandage that will continue to hold pressure on the packing. Here we use several hand towels from the hotel bathroom, as well as torn strips of sheets to make a wound packing bandage. The neck and axial wound packing bandages are identical but oriented in opposite directions.

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.