It has become a hallmark of terror attacks and school shootings: the fateful minutes or hours when the wounded are hunkered down, waiting for the violence to play out and for help to arrive.
In a knife and car-ramming attack at Ohio State University on Monday, one of the 11 wounded victims hid in a campus building for nearly 90 minutes before police gave the all-clear and she could be treated.
When a gunman opened fire at an Orlando, Florida, nightclub in June, a woman sent a frantic text message to her mother saying she had been shot and could not stop the bleeding. She later died.
Such incidents are the impetus behind a new federal initiative to train everyone at schools and other public places — custodians, security guards and administrators — on how to treat gunshots, gashes and other injuries until actual emergency medical technicians can get to the scene.
“We don’t want you to just hide and bleed to death like we saw in Orlando and other places,” said Lawrence Zacarese, the assistant chief of police at Stony Brook University, which is spearheading training for school districts and colleges across the country. “We want you hiding and maintaining and doing some administration of first aid until we can get there.”
At a training session on Tuesday, paramedics and doctors brought in fake body parts — blood spurting from the wounds — to show staffers of a Long Island school district how to tie tourniquets and pack open wounds with whatever they have.
“Seconds matter. It really can be minutes when you can lose your life,” said James Vosswinkel, chief of trauma and emergency surgery at Stony Brook University Hospital, who led the training.
“Take yesterday at Ohio State: Someone is hiding out, and if they are hemorrhaging, what do they have available? Do they have shoe strings on? Do they have a tie on? Can they make a tourniquet?” Vosswinkel said.
Doctors emphasized that in the critical seconds after an attack, it is important for teachers and other school staff to stay calm and begin assessing injuries.
Teachers learned to apply tourniquets in case a student is shot in the arms or legs — using T-shirts or belts, if necessary — and to stick anything they can to pack wounds in the torso.
“I don’t care if you stick Kleenex in there, pack it up,” Vosswinkel said.
“We want the average person, even if they are injured themselves, to be able to perform these potentially life-saving medical skills,” he added.
However, they drew the line on untrained people trying to do more invasive emergency procedures, such as trying to remove a bullet, which could end up making the bleeding worse or causing an infection.
Among the questions raised during the training: What do you do if a kindergartner is shot? How do you keep a class of kids quiet while holding down a five-year-old child and try to stop them from bleeding to death?
Stony Brook doctors have reached out to local schools to offer the training, but are looking to expand the program as part of a US Department of Homeland Security initiative to other schools, colleges and police departments across the country.
“Nobody should die from preventable hemorrhage,” Vosswinkel said.
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