Naval Medical Center Portsmouth –
Uncontrolled bleeding is the leading cause of death resulting from injury. In the critical moments after a traumatic injury, any bystander can become a lifeline. That is the core principle behind the "Stop the Bleed" training initiatives being provided by Naval Medical Center Portsmouth (NMCP) trauma center personnel.
“Stop the Bleed is a really useful skills class meant for your average person who could be responding to an emergency before emergency services have time to get from their facilities to the site,” said Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Malachi Gregory, a corpsman assigned to Central Sterile Supply at NMCP. “By teaching these very basic stop the bleed skills, we're able to help adjust that number.”
The Stop the Bleed campaign is a national initiative that aims to empower individuals to act as immediate responders in a bleeding emergency. The medical center's trauma experts are reaching out to the Hampton Roads community, teaching civilians to be that person.
“We teach lay people who have no medical background — students in high schools, people who work out in the community — how to put pressure on a bleeding wound, pack a bleeding wound, and put tourniquets on limbs,” said Lt. Stephanie Martinez, Main Operating Room Trauma Nurse Coordinator at NMCP. “Here at the command [NMCP], we have about 74 instructors consisting of nurses, corpsmen, doctors, and residents providing the training.”
“We teach them how to use a Combat Application Tourniquet (CAT) tourniquet, and if they don’t have a tourniquet, we teach them to just utilize pressure and packing until help arrives,” said Martinez. When a neighbor, a friend, or someone nearby is the first person on scene when someone is shot, stabbed, or injured, this training can make a difference between life and death.
Stop the Bleed students are trained using hands on learning. They are taught how to hold pressure the proper way, how to pack a wound the proper way, and how to place tourniquets the proper way. They are first taught using mannequins, but then progress to placing tourniquets on each other, so they are actually doing it on a person, and they can feel how tight it needs to be. “Students learn to feel for a pulse just to make sure they have cut off the circulation to the bleeding,” said Martinez.
Since the end of 2023 the instructors have trained over 1300 people. And town of the Portsmouth is planning to place Stop the Beed kits in all the automated external defibrillator (AED) packages around the city and wants all of their town employees trained to use them.
As NMCP operates as a Level II Trauma Center, the Stop the Bleed training it provides serves as a powerful reminder that the ability to save a life can be in anyone's hands. The skills learned in this training are creating a force of responders ready to act at a moment's notice, whether on the front lines, at the store, or right at home.
NMCP, a nationally acclaimed, state-of-the-art military treatment facility, and its Branch Health and Community Branch Health Clinics provide medical care for veterans, warfighters, and their families. Additionally, NMCP is a premier readiness and training platform that provides superior medical training for military medical service members at the U.S. military's oldest, continuously operating military hospital. It supports pioneering research and teaching programs to prepare new doctors, nurses, allied health professionals, and hospital corpsman for combat operations and public health crises.