HARTFORD, Conn — If you had been standing at the finish line of the Boston Marathon in April 2013, would you have known how to help those injured in the bombing?
What about a car accident, or a train derailment... or last week at the Kansas City Chiefs parade?
A first aid program being taught around the world is designed to make sure you do and it traces it's roots back here to Connecticut, and one of the worst episodes of violence in our history.
It's called "Stop the Bleed." Over the years, CPR has become required learning for teachers and coaches and lots of other people in all walks of life. It's valuable training that has saved many lives, but it doesn't address the number one cause of preventable death after an injury, severe bleeding. Stop the Bleed does.
Dr. David Shapiro and a team of volunteers from Trinity Health recently taught a Stop the Bleed course for teachers at Avon High School. He explained the three basic steps of treating a severe bleeding injury.
"It's holding pressure, providing packing and putting on a tourniquet," he told them. Just like CPR-- Stop the Bleed covers the basics... teaching skills most anyone can learn. After a brief lecture, students break up into groups and practice the skills hands on with specially designed but very simple training equipment. They learn how to react and respond, when to use pressure, how to pack a wound, when use a tourniquet, and how long to hold it.
The idea is to turn everyone who takes the class into what Shapiro calls immediate responders. "We don't call them first responders, says Shapiro, we call them immediate responders. These are folks that are at the ready. They're somebody standing in the street when somebody gets hit by a car or a bike crashes and they can instantly turn on the I can help you."
Stop the Bleed has been taught for several years now... and millions have taken the class across the globe. What you may not know is that Stop the Bleed is one of more than two dozen life saving programs created right here in Connecticut, in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shooting.
Dr. Len Jacobs, a trauma surgeon at Hartford Hospital, is credited with getting the Stop the Bleed ball rolling. He says the morning of the Sandy Hook shooting, his emergency room was told to expect casualties, and they put the choppers on standby, but they were quickly told to stand down, because, tragically, there was no one to pick up.
After that, Jacobs petitioned the American College of Surgeons, where he sits on the Board of Regents, and got authorization to form a committee, which came to be known as the Hartford Consensus. This panel of national experts went to work determining how to train people to stop severe bleeding.
"The problem is that the public, generally speaking, sees a bad event, they call 9-1-1, then they run for cover," explains Jacobs. "What we want to do is empower people to move toward the bleeding person and do something."
Their work caught the attention of then president Barack Obama, who issued a Presidential Directive that put the resources and expertise of the federal government at their disposal. "So that got us the military, the FBI, Homeland Security, police, fire, and then emergency response services and hospitals." Jacobs says they were given a very simple charge: create a program to empower the public to stop bleeding immediately.
And they did, using knowledge gleaned from emergency rooms, accident scenes, battlefields and more. A decade later Stop the Bleed is being taught by 200-thousand instructors in 150 countries and 3.6 million people have received the training.
And that's just the start. Jacobs says they conducted a nationwide survey, and nine out of ten people said they would be willing to help in an accident or emergency, and would be willing to be trained to stop severe bleeding. He says the goal is to reach 100 million people with this life saving training.
The Sandy Hook school shooting was horrible no matter how you look at it. Nothing is worth what those families went through in December of 2012. But, Stop the Bleed and 25 other campaigns and programs that sprang up in its wake do represent a silver lining around that dark cloud, and lives are being saved as a result.
Brent Hardin is an anchor at FOX61 News. He can be reached at bhardin@fox61.com. Follow him on Facebook, X and Instagram.
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