OhioHealth Offers Free Training For Life-Threatening Accidents

On March 31, OhioHealth Mansfield Hospital’s trauma team will train the general public in simple bleeding control methods for casualties of accidents, shootings and other life-threatening incidences.

 Three two-hour classes, beginning at 10 a.m., noon, and 2 p.m., will be held at North Central State College in The James W. Kehoe Center for Advanced Learning, 175 Mansfield Avenue, Shelby. The instruction is designed for people with no medical background and is part of a national Stop the Bleed awareness and education campaign, kicking off the same day.

 Class participants will rotate among skill stations, using partners and props to practice hemorrhage control techniques such as packing a wound and wound compression, with and without a tourniquet.

“We’ll show them how to find the wound and what to do about it, even when you don’t have anything with you,” said Wendy Gunder, RN, an injury prevention specialist at Mansfield Hospital, who is helping to coordinate the Stop the Bleed classes.

Loss of blood is the most common cause of pre-hospital deaths, said Jason Straus, MD, medical director and trauma surgeon at Mansfield Hospital. “If a major vessel is lacerated, a victim can die within five minutes,” Dr. Straus said. “By the time our first responders get to the scene, it may be too late. That’s why we are teaching these bleeding control techniques to what we call the immediate responders – the non-injured people who witness the event.”

Dr. Straus compared the Stop the Bleed campaign to public education efforts about cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) for heart attacks and the Heimlich maneuver for choking.

 Partners from the public and private sectors unveiled the national Stop the Bleed campaign in 2013 in response to school shootings and other mass casualties. “Our entire trauma team is involved in this, from our surgeon to our registrars,” said Laura Pond, RN, trauma program manager at Mansfield Hospital, a Level II trauma center — the only trauma center in a 60-mile radius.

In order to teach the classes, staff members completed an instructor course, “but we already had hands-on knowledge from our experience,” Pond said.

The American College of Surgeons designed the classes, which include the latest advances in military medicine gleaned during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Unfortunately, this training is not just for big events,” said Mansfield Hospital trauma team member Chris Ambrosino, CNP, a certified nurse practitioner. “The skills also can be used at home or in the workplace. Mansfield has a lot of manufacturing, so extremity trauma is something we see.”