Stopping the bleeding: New survey will benchmark current LEO TEMS readiness

I was recently speaking with a newfound contact in law enforcement — in fact, he’s connected with the Fire and EMS disciplines as well — who was telling me about a 400-sworn police agency in the middle of the country at which every patrol officer is fully-EMS trained. 

That’s not likely to be the case in your agency, but it begs the question: Are you confident you’ve had an adequate level of training (and have the necessary equipment) to render life-saving aid to yourself or a fellow officer so that you/they have a fighting chance until EMS can get to the scene? 

In one of the recent editions of Force Science News, my friend and PoliceOne colleague Chuck Remsberg asks a similar question: “What’s your experience with controlling bleeding in the field?”

This isn’t so much a “tip” in the classic sense, but indirectly, with your participation in a brief five-minute survey, we may ultimately save the lives of countless officers. 

I’m hopeful we can enlist as many PoliceOne Members as possible to participate in a new survey — conducted in association with The VALOR Project — which stands to benchmark current LEO TEMS capabilities. This important effort can help to determine what needs to be done — from both a training and equipment standpoint — to better prepare our officers out on the streets. 

The survey is being conducted by Dr. Matt Sztajnkrycer, a Force Science Certification Course instructor, Minnesota SWAT doc, and Mayo Clinic researcher, in partnership with Detective John Landry of the Hillsboro Beach (Fla.) Police Department.  It is intended better understand “the methods and need for bleeding control in law enforcement circumstances,” Remsberg wrote. 

Among the questions you’ll be asked are things like:

• What training have you received for controlling hemorrhaging from wounds to yourself or fellow officers?
• What equipment do you carry for such a challenge?
• What field experiences have you had where controlling blood loss was critical before the arrival of EMS?

“The responses we get will help determine the simplest means, the most effective equipment, and the least perishable training for stopping life-threatening bleeding under conditions of active threat,” Sztajnkrycer told Remsberg in Force Science News #203.

The survey is anonymous, and you can answer as many of the questions as you wish. 

Let’s face it, the response time of available EMS resources is not always immediate. Sometimes it’s longer than ten minutes. We’ve seen research which indicates that most gunshot trauma victims have five minutes to be stabilized from life-threatening injuries. After that first five minutes, the victim of a life-threatening gunshot wound has significantly diminished chances of survival.

Hopefully, with enough responses to the survey being conducted by Sztajnkrycer and Landry, we can create an unstoppable momentum toward equipping every officer in America with the same training and equipment as the abovementioned agency.