Preparing Kids to Survive Active Shooters

In a follow up of other "Stop the Bleed" training in the area, area teens are also learning at summer camps to stop their friends from bleeding to death if and when their schools are a target of an active shooter. A sign of the times? The "cost of freedom?" I leave it to the reader to decide. From today's News-Gazette:

Stop the Bleed: Teens get a lesson in trauma response
Instead of relaxing by the pool on their summer vacation, 75 teens were thinking about worst-case scenarios Thursday afternoon. While learning about health care procedures at Carle's three-day Scrub Camp, they were also taught how to survive a school shooting.

"Even if they're in a library, we think every kid should know how to stop their friend from bleeding to death," said Mary Beth Voights, nurse practitioner and coordinator of trauma services at Carle...

The students were split into groups to test what they learned by practicing putting tourniquets on one another, making sure they were tight enough to stop the blood flow of a potential injury...

The national campaign Stop the Bleed has been offering presentations to public schools since last year. Now, Carle's trauma department offers Stop the Bleed training to schools in a 21-county area of East Central Illinois and has trained nearly 1,200 school employees through its hour-long training presentation.

"We start with the schools because students are a captive audience, and it's where the most traumatic injuries have occurred in groups," Voights said. "Schools are where we see the biggest mass shootings."

Moore said local schools have been receiving Stop the Bleed kits — with instructions, quick-clotting gauze, gloves, a marker and a tourniquet — which are installed near their automated external defibrillators.

"We want to teach not only schools but churches and assembly centers what to do during a traumatic event," he said. "For now, we'll start with places where big groups of people gather. Our next goal is to hit the universities. And soon, it has to go out to everyone."

Full article here.