Save a Life: Control the Bleed
Severe bleeding is the leading cause of preventable death from traumatic injury, and it can kill in as little as three to five minutes. The average EMS response time is about seven minutes nationally and much longer in rural areas. When someone is bleeding badly, the person standing next to them is the one who can save their life.
Save a Life: Control the Bleed is a short class based on one section of the Emergency First Aid Fundamentals curriculum. It focuses only on recognizing and stopping life-threatening bleeding. You don’t need a medical background or first-responder training, and I teach each skill step by step. You’ll spend most of the class practicing with real equipment.
What you’ll learn
- Why every second counts. How quickly a serious bleed becomes fatal, why the people on scene are the real first responders, and why trauma care now treats bleeding first. That order is called H-ABC: hemorrhage, airway, breathing, circulation.
- Finding and sizing up the bleed. How to find every source of bleeding, tell an arterial bleed from a venous one, and estimate how much blood the patient has lost.
- Direct pressure and compression bandages. Hands-on practice with compression dressings such as the Emergency Trauma Dressing, including how to apply them to the head, neck, and abdomen.
- Tourniquets. When to use one and how to apply it correctly, with hands-on practice on several commercial models. You’ll also learn to improvise a tourniquet when you don’t have one.
- Wound packing. How to control bleeding with hemostatic gauze and the thumb-over-thumb technique in “junctional” areas like the groin, armpit, and neck, where you can’t use a tourniquet.
- Chest seals. How to recognize and treat penetrating injuries to the torso, including the “sucking chest wound,” with commercial and improvised seals.
- Recognizing and treating shock. The warning signs that a patient is going into shock, and what to do about it.
- Leading a chaotic scene. The role of a trauma team leader: directing bystanders, making sure someone calls 911, and prioritizing care when there’s more than one injury or more than one patient.
- Building your own trauma kit. What belongs in a personal IFAK (individual first-aid kit), and why.
Throughout the class, you’ll work with a partner to assess and treat simulated injuries in realistic scenarios. The repetition builds the muscle memory you need to act under stress.
As in every class, you won’t be rushed or talked down to. This class is for anyone who carries a firearm, spends time outdoors, or wants to be able to help when someone gets hurt.
Class dates & registration
You’ll find class dates, times, locations, and pricing on my online scheduling page, where you can book directly.
Don’t see a date on the calendar? Contact me and tell me what you’re looking for. I’ll do my best to get something scheduled.