You Need Quality Bleeding Control Training

On April 14, 2022
By Kimberly

Ok, You Have a Kit. What’s Next?

As a teacher, my daily habit is teaching and then examining the learning process. That means teaching, then assessing, then reviewing what worked, what didn’t, what’s left to learn, how are we going to learn it, what did we learn well, what didn’t we learn. It’s an endless cycle. Learn. Same with bleeding control.

Back to that spare tire – it does you no good if you can’t figure out how to access it, and if you don’t know how to use it. Familiarize yourself with your supplies, then seek reputable, comprehensive training. If bleeding control training is the last step before losing a life; it’s worth learning and learning well.

Professional Input

When my dive partner and I took a Rob Pincus Integrity, Consistency and Efficiency I.C.E. defensive shooting class, it was only a few days after the Parkland shooting. As an expert in his field of training, he had just met the previous day with officials and responders from the tragedy.

Pincus has years of experience, and after taking a class with him and observing his training, I value his perspective. So you know “who” he is and why I listen to his opinions; here’s the brief from his website.

“Rob Pincus is a professional trainer, author and consultant. He and his staff at I.C.E. Training Company provide services to military, law enforcement, private security and students interested in self-defense. Pincus is the Developer of the Combat Focus® Shooting program, the most efficient defensive firearms training methodology available today.”

The course Rob teaches provides efficient training methodologies to those interested in developing firearms, tactical operations and defensive skills. These methods stress gaining maximum value from limited training resources and working well with what the body does naturally under real-world conditions.

The training is rigorous, and at the beginning, he predicted we would learn much more than the skills he was presenting. And, we sure did. Taking his class, though on an entirely different subject than what I teach made me a better teacher. That’s part of education – always learning, reassessing.

Familiarity With Gear Is Critical

I asked Pincus about his experience talking to the officers and medics. Specifically, I asked him what was the one thing that the first responders thought they could have done better. I threw it out there hard and fast, like a television network anchor.

My question surprised him. His answer surprised me. He said they had loads of training. Also, he said they had loads of supplies. The one aspect of their response that he said they reported to him that they could have been a bit quicker on was gear familiarity.

Pincus said in talking with the first responders in the Parkland Shooting, they talked about some new medical kits that they had acquired only days before the shooting, and in retrospect, they thought they could have been a bit more familiar with what was where in the kit because seconds count.

Lose All Your Blood In Under Four Minutes

We recently had Bleeding Control training at my school for our faculty, and our trainer told us in the case of a trauma wound to the extremities, we have thirty seconds to apply a tourniquet, and a person can lose all their blood in under four minutes.

A couple days ago I read about a trauma nurse who checks his gear every single day. I’m a school teacher, and unlikely to need my bleeding control gear every day. However, it’s now a part of my duties, so I’m doing my best to seek professional training on all aspects of this new responsibility.

When the pros are recommending training, and they are self-evaluating that they need to be even more familiar with their equipment; that means I have a lot of learning to do.

Repetition, Familiarity, Patterning, and Routine

Before a dive, I am that SCUBA diver who insists we go over the hand signals before every dive, then locates everyone’s gauges, dump valves and weight dump releases. In a sailing class, I am that sailing instructor who leads everyone to the bow to inspect the anchor locker and counts the steps to putting that anchor off that boat and onto the bottom before every sail.

And yes, I am that school teacher who opens my CFAK every Monday morning and runs my fingers over each item in my bag, thinking through each reach, each step.

Because that is muscle memory. That is the mental picture-drawing that Olympic athletes perform before every skate, every downhill run. They “see” themselves performing all the steps flawlessly.

And when the event comes – everything is already planned out to perfection. They are patterning their run; so it will be executed perfectly.

Rehearsal is training your muscles to remember a sequence. Olympic ice skaters would not appear to produce a flawless execution if they stopped between elements to think out the next sequence.

Which Is First – Training or Gear

Some training is free, some costs money. I’ve heard people say, “You get what you pay for,” so I’m working through all the public free training as well as some that I have purchased, or was given to me as a gift from a family member.

I’m not sure which should come first – acquiring gear and familiarization with your gear, or training. I do know you need to start somewhere.

I also know that as I further my training, I’m learning more about the gear, and I’m even changing a bit of the gear.

Since I was unwilling to be completely without any gear while still training, so I did all three at once.

Crisis Medicine

To add to my determination to complete training, on the Crisis Medicine website, the statistics below caught my attention and confirmed the need for being prepared. Not paranoid – but simply prepared. Read below:

“In any event, law enforcement arrives on average four minutes after the first 911 call; EMS arrives 4-10 minutes later. This means that in the first 10 minutes, any care a casualty receives is either performed by private citizen bystanders (First Care Provider) or others involved in the event and secondarily, law enforcement. Many casualties can die within this time frame without life-saving intervention.”

For Christmas, my dive/cycling/shooting partner gifted me with an eight hour, tactical casualty care course that can be repeated a couple times. It is through Crisis Medicine. Taught by an emergency doctor, it is very graphic and very comprehensive, covering everything from tourniquets to ballistics to wound packing and bandaging.

My First Aid and CPR annual course simply does not have enough depth and breadth for active school shooter training. So, I highly recommend the one from Crisis Medicine. In fact, I learned so much from the training, that I wanted to be able to make it more affordable for other teachers to have access. In a collaboration with Crisis Medicine, I’m able to offer you a 20% discount; just use my code, “DeepWH” at checkout for the TC2 course.

My dive partner’s decision to gift me with training from this company was not a whim. First, he conducted months of searching, reading reviews, reading curriculums, watching previews of training from several companies. After a lot of research, he chose Crisis Medicine and took the first course, TC2.

It was only after he had taken the training himself that he rated it highly enough to give a registration for the TC2 course to me. That’s some pretty highly-recommended training!

There are other trainings available. The quality of them varies. Here are more ideas:

Department of Homeland Security

There are three courses offered on the Department of Homeland and Security, DHS, website; you might have heard of “Stop the Bleed.”

The first, “You are the Help Until the Help Arrives,” is offered by DHS and is a very basic online video course.

The second, “Bleeding Control for the Injured” is an in-person course. Click the link to learn more about locations and times.

The third, “First Care Provider,” is an online video course with actual content such as how to place a tourniquet, but no wound packing.

North American Rescue

North American Rescue has a series of training videos covering everything from chest seals to extractions.

There is no charge for these.

Tactical Medical Solutions

Tactical Medical Training Resources and Videos is a video gallery of single-topic videos.

TacMed Solutions’ Online Training Portal

TacMed University – according to the website is an e-learning/information sharing platform where you will find relevant information on pre-hospital trauma treatment and equipment. Their list says some of the courses and information include:

–Information on TacMed and other trauma products
-Tactics
-Discussion groups
-Published clinical reports, studies, and papers
-Free or low-cost online classes and training
-Associate Trainer Program members’ training content
-Case studies on incidents and uses
-Anything relevant we can find to help you succeed!

I have received an invitation, and have signed up for the courses. However, I haven’t started on this training yet since I have a couple others, including a DAN course to complete first. Please let me know if you complete any of this set and how you like it.

Suggestions for Training

Other online courses are available, and tons more reference materials and videos are posted online.

If anyone comes across any that we can use for certification points; please let us all know.

I do plan to submit my Crisis Medicine certificate to my own school district and see if I qualify for any of those hours spent taking the class as CEU’s – continuing education units – for re-certification purposes.

What to Read Next:

What’s in the bleeding control kit I assembled for my classroom, and detailed reasons for each item’s choice: What’s In My Classroom Bleeding Control Kit

Or, Read This Next: Classroom Bleeding Control Kit // High School Teacher Packing in the Classroom

Using my links helps me continue to bring free content to you, and increase the number of supplies in my own CFAK. I usually add a few more items to my bag every couple paydays, so thank you in advance for your care for your own students and co-workers’ safety.