‘STOP THE BLEED’: THE SIMPLE ART OF SAVING LIVES


It has only been since the early 1990s that CPR training has been available to the general public, and this simple training has saved countless lives. MRMC’s ‘Stop the Bleed’ campaign aims to save even more lives with training to treat traumatic hemorrhage.


by Ramin A. Khalili


“It’s not like a horror movie,” said Davis, director of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command’s Combat Casualty Care Research Program (CCCRP), talking about the mechan- ics of traumatic bleeding and perception versus reality. “You’re never going to see projectile bleeding from a patient like you do on the screen, but people always think they will.”


F Said Davis, “And that’s a barrier, I think … a problem.”


It’s a problem for the military, certainly—as hemorrhage remains the No. 1 killer on the battlefield, and thus a chief concern for Davis and his team—but it’s also a growing problem for Amer- ican citizens on the home front. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, trauma is the No. 1 cause of death in the United States for people under 46, accounting for nearly 50 percent of those fatalities. But dive deeper into those numbers and you find the remnants of a slew of recent mass trauma events, like the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut; the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing; and the 2015 Amtrak train derailment in Philadelphia. Te message, then, has become overwhelmingly and tragically clear: Preparedness and


or Col. Michael Davis, the problem isn’t the blood—as a reconstructive surgeon by trade, it’s never been about the blood—rather it’s the way Hollywood always make the blood look so … bloody.


vigilance are now requirements as injuries formerly confined to faraway combat zones now occur randomly and unpredictably on American street corners.


Enter the “Stop the Bleed” campaign.


A HOMEGROWN EFFORT Launched at the White House in late 2015 via presidential proclamation, “Stop the Bleed” is a federal outreach program designed to save lives by teaching American citizens the simple basics of military-tested bleeding control: steps like using tour- niquets to stanch blood flow and packing open wounds with clean gauze. Tese same steps have contributed to a 67 percent decrease in fatalities caused by extremity bleeding during recent U.S. conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as compared with previ- ous U.S. involvement in Vietnam.


Based on that success rate and CCCRP’s overall expertise, the National Security Council asked the program to develop the campaign in direct reaction to the aforementioned domestic inci- dents, with the goal of fostering a new brand of national resilience at the grassroots level.


Indeed, “Stop the Bleed” is the reason Davis now straddles foreign combat zones and the U.S. home front as part of his daily duties. For him, the connection—and cooperation—between


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Army AL&T Magazine


Spring 2019


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