Assessing Efficacy of Stop the Bleed Education

Abstract

Stop the Bleed is a national grassroots, education campaign effort that focuses on empowering the public to recognize and control life-threatening bleeding emergencies. The White House, Homeland Security, and the American College of Surgeons - Committee on Trauma, and the Hartford Consensus have endorsed the program since 2015.  Stop the Bleed is a call to action plan to train the public on hemorrhage recognition and control until medical personnel are available for management.  An additional initiative is to place bleeding control kits in every public place. This project focused on educating 80-100 professionally trained and lay persons utilizing handouts and presentation information provided by the Stop the Bleed campaign. The education process involved the use of material focused on hemorrhage recognition while the second component of training involved active and return demonstration of tourniquet use, wound packing with gauze, and hemostatic agents for major bleeding control. A retrospective study evaluating pre and post questionnaires was utilized to assess knowledge of bleeding control education. The goal of this project was to prove that the Stop the Bleed campaign initiative can effectively train individuals regardless of current knowledge level. The significance of this study is to prove efficacy and support training of the public in responding to natural and unintentional disasters that result in uncontrolled bleeding.