3 Minutes. 1 Tourniquet. Can You Stop the Bleed?

Most people don’t realize how fast someone can bleed out... or how easy it is to stop it (if you know what to do). In this episode, Jimmy and Megan are joined by Miguel for a deep dive into one of the most practical, life-saving skills out there: stopping the bleed.

But don’t expect a boring first aid lecture. We’re talking real talk: how white clothes can trick you, what soaking through a winter jacket really means, and why you should never trust a belt to save a life. You’ll learn how to tell if bleeding is life-threatening, the big mistake people make when they underestimate a “little” wound, and the three tools every responder should know how to use... tune in to find out!

And just wait until you hear what one student did to test how much a pint really is (useless hint: it involved teriyaki sauce and a laptop).

Whether you’ve had Stop the Bleed training or are just curious what all the fuss is about, this episode is packed with street-smart safety tips, hands-on advice, and the kind of stories you’ll definitely want to share at your next team meeting.

Life Safety Associates specializes in emergency response training for corporate ERT Teams. We help businesses create competent and confident first responders who are ready to handle unexpected emergencies. For more information you find us @lifesafetyassoc or email@lifesafety.com.

Chapters

• 0:00 Stop the Bleed Training and Techniques
• 8:21 Advanced Wound Packing and Tourniquet
• 13:06 Stop the Bleed Training Opportunities

Transcript

Megan: 0:23

Okay.

Jimmy: 0:26

Hey, it's Jimmy with another Life and Safety Podcast. I'm here with Megs and we got Miguel with us also. It's a little family gathering today and it's Stop the Bleed Month, so we're going to talk about how to stop the bleed, maybe a little trauma stuff, some of the things we've encountered during class while teaching this. So stop the bleed is a super important thing. 80% of traumatic injuries people bleeding to death outside of the hospital is preventable and President Obama saw this problem and actually wrote an executive order to start the Stop the Bleed campaign.

Jimmy: 1:14

Now they're based out of Chicago. They do a great job with getting stuff out there. Super simple things is they took the best traits from the military medical stuff local emergency medical, emergency things, aha, arc, ashe, things like that and put it together with the committee of surgeons, the trauma surgeons um union. So they brought those things together and that's kind of where tourniquets and stuff like that kind of came from. As far as being taught more regularly, now I became a stop the bleed instructor in 20 I don't remember when before COVID so kind of. You know a good way to measure things prior to 2020.

Jimmy: 2:20

I did it and I think life safety is still one of the only stop the bleed instructors as far as commercial goes, like, so companies that teach life stop the bleed and they can give the stop the bleed certificate. So what is stop the bleed? Stop the bleed is just what it sounds like. Is we're actually stopping major traumatic breathing? Is we're actually stopping major traumatic breathing? So we're going to go around the table a little bit and talk about what is life-threatening bleeding, because that's what we're really looking for is life-threatening bleeding. So with that, I'm going to go to our lead instructor, megan, first.

Megan: 3:03

Ooh, la la.

Jimmy: 3:04

Yeah, yeah, give me a sign or symptom of life-threatening bleeding.

Megan: 3:11

Alrighty. Well, I'm going to steal the obvious one. If there is a puddle of blood by the patient, we go by the patient's fist size. So if you have the patient, make a fist and then look at the back of their fist, that's about the size of the puddle that we're looking for Now, that being said, I don't expect you to actually stop and ask a patient who is having life-threatening bleeding wait, make a fist, let me look at it. No, but you can like take a look and look at the back of their hand and see about how big that is.

Megan: 3:41

So if we're talking about life-threatening bleeding, humans have 10 to 12 pints of blood in their body at any given moment. A larger human is going to have more blood in their body when you donate blood. You donate a pint of blood and your body can compensate for that, meaning it can sort of manage to lose that much blood and still function properly. You might get a little bit dizzy, you might feel a little lightheaded, but you're still functioning. You know, if you've ever donated blood, they give you some you know orange juice and a little cracker thing and then you're good to go. Um, once you start to lose more than one pint of blood. That's when it starts to become dangerous.

Megan: 4:20

Uh, a pint of liquid is a pretty, pretty large, large, that's words. Um, it's a pretty significant amount of liquid. But if you're taking into account, what's the person sitting on, what are they wearing? If they're stabbed in the side and then you have a pint of blood come out from their side, if they're wearing, you know, a cotton shirt and a cotton jacket, that's going to soak up a lot of blood. If they're sitting on a padded chair, that's going to soak up a lot of blood. So how much of that blood is really going to make it to the ground? Not that much. So that's why we use the size of the patient's fist. If the puddle is larger than the size of the patient's fist and we've taken into account how much blood is really making it to the ground, that's a significant amount and they're probably past the point of being able to compensate. So we need to start treating for blood loss immediately and start to handle that.

Miguel: 5:10

It's a lot of words yeah, a lot of words, very good job, though they're gonna be cold as well. I know that one for a fact like cold to the touch yeah, definitely like it could be 100 degrees outside and they're still gonna be feeling like like they need a jacket and a blanket.

Megan: 5:28

Witnessed that one before. So not only are they feel cold to the touch by you touching them, but they also they'll tell you they feel cold.

Miguel: 5:34

Yeah, they'll be shivering sometimes. Yeah, definitely.

Megan: 5:37

Alrighty. So that's some signs and symptoms to look out for if they're bleeding. What are some ways that we can treat bleeding Our three big ones?

Miguel: 5:47

Direct pressure.

Megan: 5:49

Good direct pressure. What does that mean?

Miguel: 5:51

That means we're going to apply pressure to the top of the wound.

Megan: 5:56

Exactly exactly as it sounds Direct pressure. Put pressure directly on the wound. Glove up guys, make sure you're protecting yourselves from any blood-borne pathogens or any things that might, you know, cause harm to you. So wear your gloves and then just throw your weight behind it and put weight onto that so that the blood stops coming out of the wound. It's pretty simple Our easiest and least intensive way of stopping the bleed. It's going to work on pretty much any type of wound anywhere on the body and it's a good go-to.

Jimmy: 6:30

Also one of the most effective things we can do right is we just hold pressure. Hold pressure Now when we are doing that. So I think some really good things. So one of the things I wanted to point out with megan said about the puddle I'm gonna circle back to that real quick. What if the person's on mud in mud? Are we gonna see that puddle of blood?

Jimmy: 6:52

no, not so much so that's, we got to go back to the clothes, right? Uh, what about if the person's in the snow? We're gonna see that right, yeah much more, much more.

Jimmy: 7:05

right, I think I don't know if I ever told any of you guys the story. We had a um, we were doing an online class during covid and one of our students on zoom he couldn't really just visualize how big of a size of a fist was and they said, well, think of, like you know, the pint like Megan was bringing up, and he literally poured a pint of teriyaki sauce because that's what he had and he took it and he was in the snow, he was at his snow house, you know, in the mountains, and he walked out to the snow and he threw it on the thing. He's like, oh, and he actually showed, took the laptop and he showed the glass. He's like that's not that much.

Jimmy: 7:51

and I was like, yeah, that's what I'm trying to tell you yeah you know the pint is huge, but the size of the fist, that size you know being absorbed and all those other things that megan talked about, is definitely different you mentioned clothes.

Megan: 8:02

I want to touch on that. In the same way of you know, snow is white. You're going to see the blood there. White clothes are going to show it a lot better than black clothes, especially a big, bulky black jacket with a wound to the abdomen. It's going to hide it a lot more effectively than you know a thin white shirt or something absolutely, absolutely.

Jimmy: 8:22

So we're holding pressure. It's seeping through, it's just not holding it. We can't keep the blood inside the person. We need to change our game or step our game up. Go to our next tool and that's going to be wound packing right, so we wound pack. So we remember we pack limbs, all right. Then we seal the box, so anything on our chest. So if you took the person's head off, their limbs off, what's left? The torso? That's the box. We're holding pressure there. We're holding pressure there and the body cavity. If we start wound packing inside that, we're gonna move the organs. We're going to move the stomach, you know, the intestines. It's going to be too big, too much stuff going on there. We're going to cause more problems. Also, we don't have enough gauze with us. I was teaching a little refresher class in-house last night and we put this three-inch wide roll of roller gauze that's four yards long into a four-inch gauze, a small four-inch by four-inch cube, and we fit it on there.

Megan: 9:38

To be clear, it's not the full cube that's empty. It's a wound cube which, if you come take a class with us, you get to play with them. But the wound he's talking about is about A little bit bigger than the average thumb and you were able to fit, you know, an entire roll of gauze in there.

Jimmy: 9:55

Yeah, it's my superpower.

Megan: 10:00

No, I'm teasing, it could be your superpower too. It could be. Stop teasing, it could be your superpower too.

Jimmy: 10:03

It could be. Stopping the bleed could be your superpower, Right. So we're going to pack the wound and then tourniquet. If we have a tourniquet, a commercial tourniquet is preferred the cat tourniquet from North America Rescue. Don't recommend buying a tourniquet on Amazon.

Megan: 10:23

In fact recommend against it.

Jimmy: 10:25

Don't always know what you're going to get A Sam tourniquet or a Soft Tee Wide tourniquet? Those are soft tee wide tourniquet. Those are my three favorite tourniquets out there. Um, highly recommend those and it's their ease for ease of use. So a lot of times we're getting questioned and I'll ask this up to the other instructors um, what do you guys tell people when they say, hey, what? What about a belt? Because we've heard belts work great. For my whole career, almost my whole life, I've heard If somebody's bleeding really bad, just put a belt on and use a belt as a tourniquet. What have you? How do you answer that question? What's your thoughts, what's your take?

Miguel: 11:11

Anybody, I feel like it's not as effective. The tourniquet will stop the complete blood flow from coming out of that wound, while the belt I don't know, at least personally it's a lot harder to use and get it to that same standard that the actual tourniquet itself does.

Megan: 11:33

Yeah, absolutely.

Megan: 11:35

One of the phrases that I like to use is a commercial tourniquet will stop the blood flow, while an improvised tourniquet might slow it down, but it's not going to ever fully stop the blood flow, especially with a belt.

Megan: 11:48

Now a belt you know my belts, most belts you know available, they have the belt notches, but the chances of the belt notch being perfectly sized to be able to stop the blood from the limb that you're on is ridiculously small, nearing impossible, I would say.

Megan: 12:06

And then also, part of what makes a commercial tourniquet really effective is that windlass, that sort of stick-like part of it that allows you to tighten it down. So you tighten it down as much as you can with the velcro and then you take that strap, the windlass stick sort of, and twist it and that's able to get that final bit of tightness that's able to fully block off those blood vessels and actually stop the bleed. And that's not something that you're going to be able to get with a belt, especially, um, you know, your average leather or leather-esque belt. Um, they found that you would have to have something equivalent to like a chair leg to actually be able to be that windless and tighten it down and get that full tightness and that's just not a realistic thing to carry around with you. I mean, I don, I don't know about you, but I don't carry a chair leg in my back pocket.

Miguel: 12:52

I sure don't either.

Jimmy: 12:54

I wish I did Very versatile Always tourniquet the limbs, pack the joints and seal the box. And those are just some really easy things to think about on how to control bleeding. Easy things to think about on how to control bleeding. Uh, look out for life safety. Social media pages. We're gonna probably offer at least one or two free stop to bleed classes on a saturday. If you're interested, be on the lookout and we'll get you signed up not to shamelessly plug, but I do highly recommend those.

Megan: 13:29

I've made my family members go take them when they were offered last year. So Jimmy got to experience my family on that. But, it's really good. My family feels a lot more prepared, so that I'm not the only one who knows how to stop the bleed.

Jimmy: 13:45

Yeah, a lot of fun classes. You come out, you'll meet the team and we'll hang out. All right, team, be safe, Peace.