Pitman High students were encouraged to purchase tourniquets for their sweethearts this Valentine’s Day instead of the traditional chocolates and flowers. 

“Everybody you love needs a tourniquet,” said Rena Bryant, the intervention coordinator for Doctors Medical Services’ Trauma Services Department, to a group of about 100 students at Pitman High who were taking a Stop the Bleed course on Thursday morning.

Stop the Bleed was created by the American College of Surgeons as a national campaign that trains people to control bleeding in emergencies. The campaign's goal is to improve survival rates from mass casualty events and individual incidents by empowering bystanders to help before professional help arrives.

During the seminar, Bryant taught the students the basics of how to help someone who is bleeding before emergency services arrive. The students were taught to follow the ABC’s: alert emergency services; identify the location of the bleeding and assess if it’s life-threatening; and how to apply compression to a wound to stop the bleeding. 

As part of the “compression” training, students were taught how to apply a tourniquet to a life-threatening bleed and Bryant urged the students to get one for their home and vehicle emergency kits.

Bryant and volunteers from Doctors Medical Centers have been teaching the Stop the Bleed course to community groups since 2017.

“It’s important because people can have major bleeding every single day with various events. So, whether something happened at their home, like they cut their hand with lawn equipment, or potentially hurt themselves in the kitchen. Things can happen at school where people have open fractures because of sports, or maybe there was a fight or they fell down. People’s jobs…there are situations that happen in our everyday life that people need to know how to use this information. It’s not always about the gunshots and the bombings or the big media evets, it’s just everyday events people are having major bleeding.”

Bryant told the students on Thursday that a person can bleed to death in five minutes and the average response time for emergency services across the country is eight minutes, highlighting the need for immediate intervention when someone suffers a major bleeding incident.

Tricia Hoobyar is a pharmacist with Doctors and started volunteering to teach Stop the Bleed because she saw the need for the information with her own children. 

“I think it is great that you could teach lay people how to save lives. You don’t need a doctorate degree. You don’t need graduate school. Anyone has the capability to learn how to save a life.”