Parkland Parents Learn to Help Save Lives with ‘Stop The Bleed’ Course

by Sharon Aron Baron May 8, 2018

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Photo by Sharon Aron Baron

By: Sharon Aron Baron

Westglades Middle School parents attended a Stop the Bleed course find out what they could do to help someone in an emergency situation.

Stop the Bleed is a national awareness campaign and call to action adopted by the Florida Department of Health aimed at decreasing preventable deaths through bleeding control. This was the third training course that was held at the middle school. According to Westglades PTA President Chandra James, teachers, staff, and PTA members had all completed a course led by Broward Health.

Monday evening’s course was led by Todd Seliger with the Seminole Tribe Fire Rescue, who said that after experiencing fifty active shooters in the United States in the past two years, thirty in 2017 alone, they aren’t going away.

“This is not something that is riding off into the sunset,” he said. “This is something we have to deal with on a regular basis and hopefully we never have to deal with it again here. But of course, we don’t spend every moment in our house in Parkland, we go outside of it.”

Seliger told parents that in 2011, the American College of Surgeons, the Committee on Trauma and the Hartford Consensus reviewed the children and teachers who were killed in Sandy Hook and realized that many people who died that day did so from wounds to the extremities. He said that there was no one there that went in quickly, nor did they have the tools, tourniquets or wound packing in which they were able to stop the bleeding. It was then they formed the Stop the Bleed Program.

He discussed the ABC’s to remember when encountering someone in need: A is for alert which means to call 9-1-1; B is for find the bleeding or find the sources of the injury, and C is for compress by either putting a tourniquet on or compression with hands.