Save a Life: Control the Bleed

Severe bleeding is the leading cause of preventable death from traumatic injury — and it can take a life in as little as three to five minutes. With the average EMS response time around seven minutes nationally (and far longer in rural areas), the hard truth is simple: when someone is bleeding badly, the person standing next to them is the one who will save their life, long before the ambulance ever arrives.

Save a Life: Control the Bleed is a focused, hands-on segment of our Emergency First Aid Fundamentals curriculum, dedicated entirely to recognizing and stopping life-threatening bleeding. You don’t need any medical background and you don’t need to be a first responder — these are practical, learnable skills, taught step by step, that put real life-saving ability in your hands. You’ll spend most of the class working with actual equipment, not just watching slides.

What you’ll learn

• Why every second counts — how quickly a serious bleed becomes fatal, why the people on scene are the true first responders, and why modern trauma care now puts bleeding control first (the “H-ABC” approach: hemorrhage, airway, breathing, circulation).
• Finding and sizing up the bleed — how to locate every source of bleeding, tell an arterial bleed from a venous one, and recognize how much blood loss your patient has suffered.
• Direct pressure and compression bandages — hands-on practice with modern compression dressings like the Emergency Trauma Dressing, including head, neck, and abdominal applications.
• Tourniquets — when they’re the right call and how to apply one correctly, with hands-on reps on several commercial designs — and how to improvise a field-expedient tourniquet when you don’t have one.
• Wound packing — how to control bleeding in “junctional” areas like the groin, armpit, and neck, where a tourniquet can’t reach, using hemostatic gauze and the thumb-over-thumb technique.
• Chest seals — recognizing and treating penetrating injuries to the torso, including the “sucking chest wound,” with both commercial and field-expedient seals.
• Recognizing and treating shock — the warning signs that a patient is slipping into shock, and what to do about it.
• Leading a chaotic scene — the role of a trauma team leader: directing bystanders, getting 911 on the way, 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 put these skills together in realistic, hands-on scenarios — working with a partner to assess and treat simulated injuries, much as you would in a real emergency. The goal isn’t to make you nervous; it’s to build the muscle memory and the calm confidence that let you act when it matters most.

As with every class, you’ll move at a pace that doesn’t leave anyone behind, and you won’t be rushed or talked down to. Whether you carry a firearm, spend time in the outdoors, or simply want to be the person who can help when something goes wrong, these are skills worth having.

Class Dates & Registration

Class dates, times, locations, and pricing are listed 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.