U.S. teachers learn how to stop bleeding from gunshot

PLEASANT HILL, IOWA — As she learned the basics of applying direct pressure, packing a wound with gauze and tying a tourniquet, sixth-grade math and social studies teacher Kari Stafford shook her head at the thought that this may now be an essential skill for her profession.

Stafford didn’t like it, but with school shootings now a regular occurrence, she and her colleagues have reluctantly accepted that the attacks won’t stop and that teachers must know how to keep the victims from bleeding to death.

“Learning to help and not just stand there is important,” said Stafford, who joined about a dozen other educators at a medical training session at Southeast Polk High School, a sprawling nine-year-old campus surrounded by farmland in Pleasant Hill, just east of Des Moines.

Over the past five years, about 125,000 teachers, counsellors and administrators across the country have been trained in stemming blood loss, as school officials have become resigned to the grim trend. The effort is rapidly expanding, and more schools are now stocking classrooms with supplies that would be familiar to any military medic: lightweight tourniquets, gauze coated with blood-clotting drugs and compression bandages.

Although schools are adding security and even arming teachers to deter attacks, new emphasis is being given to saving the wounded while counting down the minutes until help arrives.

The teacher triage idea was initially pushed by Dr. Lenworth Jacobs of Hartford, who operated on victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, in which 26 children and adults were killed.

Jacobs and other like-minded surgeons formed a group - which expanded to include law enforcement and other first responders that developed strategies for helping victims survive.

In many school shootings, more victims could be saved if someone had at least slowed their bleeding.

“It takes a long time, longer than it takes to bleed to death, to clear the classroom, secure it and make sure there’s not another shooter,” he said. “The person who is going to save you is the person right beside you.”

The initiative, dubbed Stop the Bleed, has spread quickly and training is now available in all 50 U.S. states.

“If students are shot in a lockdown they can just bleed out. They’ll die,” said Dena Abston, executive director of the commission. Bend students are raising money for bleeding control kits.

“A single person can’t stop a shooting, but one person can save multiple lives. And to have something like that on my conscience is a great feeling,” said Sierra Sheeks, a Bend Senior High sophomore.

Trauma care specialist Brian Feist and surgeon Richard Sidwell used a foam limb to demonstrate proper techniques, then gave teachers a chance to practise packing wounds and cinching tourniquets.

Feist explained that direct pressure was more effective on especially young children and tourniquets best for multiple wounds. The ultratight straps on a tourniquet could be very painful, he warned.

“Your patient is going to be freaking out because it’s really, really hurting,” he said.