Stop the Bleed kits available at Hershey Medical Center defibrillator stations
When someone suffers an injury that causes them to bleed rapidly, life becomes a race measured in minutes. Blood loss can kill in as little as three to four minutes.
That’s why Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center is working to ensure that the tools needed to stem patients’ deadly loss of blood are always within reach. Doctors, nurses, patients, staff members and anyone else who needs a Stop the Bleed kit will find them at each automated external defibrillator (AED) station on campus – 42 locations in all.
Large, clear-plastic boxes mounted on the wall close to each AED machine contain eight Stop the Bleed kits near each entrance to the hospital and the surgical waiting area.
Elsewhere around the Hershey campus, near AED machines are boxes containing two bags. Each bag is a Stop the Bleed kit. The more than 600 Penn State Health and College of Medicine employees who have completed Stop the Bleed training will recognize the contents of each bag for quick response to an emergency bleed:
- Instructional booklet on bleeding control
- Tourniquet
- Gauze
- Marker
- Protective gloves
- Compression bandage
Stop the Bleed is a nonprofit organization that provides resources to train and equip people to reduce traumatic-bleeding deaths.
Hospitals around the globe, including the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, train all varieties of personnel how to stop blood loss in an emergency.
“This training goes far beyond the workplace and is something that every person should learn, as we never know when we will be the first on scene to a motor vehicle crash or lawn mower accident, farming injury, etc.,” said Kim Patil, a health educator with Trauma Services at Hershey Medical Center.
Emergency Preparedness Oversight Taskforce developed the bleeding-control kit project, which is a collaboration between the emergency preparedness, trauma services, security and other departments.
For more information or to sign up for a Stop the Bleed class, call the Injury Prevention Program at 717-531-LION, x5466.
Classes are available at the University Conference Center on the following dates:
- March 19 from 4:30-6 p.m.
- April 2 from 5-6:30 p.m.
- May 22 from 5-6:30 p.m.
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