Teachers learn to Stop the Bleed
Teachers at Linden Park Elementary learned how to Stop the Bleed. The training was put on by the Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center and aims at teaching schools what to do in serious bleeding situations.
“First off, how to recognize if it’s life threatening bleeding or not,” said Kristi Caldera, director of ICU and trauma services for EIRMC. “Followed by, what to do about it. So, how to hold pressure, how to know if you’re holding enough pressure, how to pack a wound, then how to apply a tourniquet.”
The teachers learned how to perform all these tasks. They stuffed fake leg wounds and practiced tourniquets on themselves. The school said it is important to be ready for anything.
“Stop the Bleed prepares us for a large event,” said Kristoffer Smith, principal at Linden Park Elementary School. “Hopefully one that would never occur. But there could also be accidents that could happen on the playground, or anywhere else, and it’s best to be prepared.”
EIRMC is finishing up training at Idaho Falls School District 91 schools and will next be training Bonneville County School District 93. It is also donating bleed control kits to every classroom and school bus for both districts.
“We started with the schools just because, in this day and age, there are mass casualty events at school,” Caldera said. “Nobody thinks that that’s going to happen here and hopefully it never does. But we want the training out. We needed a place to start and the schools seemed like a really logical place to get into first.”
EIRMC doesn’t want the training to stop at schools. It hopes every business and organization will learn how to Stop the Bleed.
“The idea is to empower lay people who might otherwise be like, ‘Well I don’t know. you know, I’m just a teacher, or I’m just a reporter, or I’m just a bank teller, whatever I am,'” Caldera said. “To say, ‘You know what, I had this class once, I’m going to intervene. I know that I know how to hold pressure. I know how to pack this wound. I remember that it’s really important to stop this bleed.'”
If your business or organization is interested in getting stop the bleed training, you can contact EIRMC to find out more.
