The Essential Guide for When Help is NOT on the Way!

During winter, it's important to be prepared for the unique risks and injuries that can occur during this time of year. From slips and falls to hypothermia, winter weather can pose a number of potential hazards that require immediate first aid attention.

The most common fractures are usually the ones sustained by the arm or wrist, most of the time because of falling, sometimes because of blunt force trauma.

Bleeding from open wounds in combat (referring to compressible haemorrhage in this article) is very different from accidental injuries in daily life.

First-aid mistakes can increase the risk of infection or worsen an injury. In some cases, mistakes are more dangerous, or even potentially life-threatening.

There are two aspects to providing first aid and medical assistance. The first is having the skills and knowledge to know how to help in an emergency. The other is having the resources you need to put those skills into effect.

It’s important to take the proper measures when a fall occurs. Depending on the severity of the fall, every movement and step is critical. To prevent a bad situation from becoming worse, here is a guide on how to treat a fall injury.

You need a plan of action for your team to follow in the event of an emergency. A rapid rescue plan is essential for preventing secondary injuries and even death that can occur in a fall incident.

After a major disaster, the need for search, rescue, and first aid is likely to be so great that organized relief services will be unable to meet more than a small fraction of the demand. Most immediate help will come from uninjured survivors, and they will have to provide whatever first aid they can.

Although an IFAK is technically an Individual First Aid Kit, it should more appropriately be thought of as an Individual Trauma Kit. First Aid kits and First Aid courses, as commonly thought of, deal with topics more akin to band-aids than with tourniquets and life-threatening injuries.

With recent evidence, we are still surprised by how many people advocated for tactical tampons to control massive bleeding in a gunshot wound. “Depending on the bullet hole size, tampons and pads are your best bets…” Or, “A tampon would have done the same thing.” Not true!

While most travellers to the developing world and tropical destinations worry about exotic diseases like malaria, typhoid, and Zika, a traveller’s most significant infectious risk comes from traveller’s diarrhoea.

Carrying people is hard work. Carrying them with a litter makes the task easier. Non-Rigid litters are lighter and easier to store than their rigid counterparts, but they are harder to use.

Hypothermia prevention in trauma is a critical and often missed lifesaving piece of emergency medical training. Once a casualty’s massive haemorrhage is controlled, rescuers must turn their attention to the rest of the M-A-R-C-H pneumonic, specifically, to hypothermia prevention.

In our race to use tourniquets for controlling haemorrhage, we often lose sight of the value of good direct pressure as a haemorrhage control technique.

Having a sense of how much blood a trauma patient “spilt” on the ground can be very helpful for understanding and estimating the casualty’s potential for shock. Unfortunately, accurate visual estimation of blood loss and external blood volume is very challenging.

Jacob Hall, 6 years old, died of a femoral artery laceration after being shot by a 14-year-old while he was at recess at his school. Another student and a teacher were wounded. Would a tourniquet have worked to save him?

The term “junctional haemorrhage” refers to injuries and bleeding occurring at the transition zones between the extremities and the torso. Although not an extremity, the neck is generally included in this category.

Although the open pneumothorax or “sucking chest wound” is dramatic in appearance, it is rarely fatal. The principle here is although air enters the chest wall defect (eg, a gunshot wound) during inspiration, it also blows out on expiration.

There’s no such thing as the perfect first aid kit, so you should consider your needs, including the length of your trip, the size of your group, and where you will be traveling, and then build a kit that meets them.