How would you react to a bloody injury in the shop?

The Stop The Bleed campaign encourages workplaces to have blood control kits available in buildings and vehicles. The kits contain scissors, gloves, gauze for packing the wound when simple pressure is not enough, and a tourniquet.

Metal fabricating facilities can be very dangerous places. Safety shouldn’t be an afterthought.

With that in mind, a program like Stop The Bleed makes a lot of sense. It’s a campaign focused on getting people to react like a first responder would to a major injury that results in blood loss.

Have you been faced with the need to tend to someone’s wounds after an accident? Fortunately, many have not, but it can happen, especially on the shop floor where there are ample opportunities for some nasty injuries. In fact, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) information from 2016, 9.3 incidents of cuts, lacerations, and punctures occur per 10,000 manufacturing workers. (The median number of days away from work because of these injury types is three.) Given that U.S. manufacturers employ more than 12.8 million workers, people have to deal with plenty of injuries where blood is present.

Also, let’s not forget amputations that might occur on the job. No one wants to think about it, but anyone who worked in manufacturing in the 20th century probably has a story or two about someone losing a digit or, even worse, an arm in an industrial accident. The BLS puts the incident rate for amputations at 0.5 per 10,000 full-time workers. Manufacturing has come a long way in the last decades, but safety risks still are present in a major way in many facilities.

That’s why this training to stop blood loss is important. Medical professionals need time to arrive at the scene of an accident, yet any sort of immediate response to stem the loss of blood is going to help the injured victim immensely.

Dr. Habeeba Park, an assistant professor, department of surgery, University of Maryland School of Medicine, is a staunch proponent of the Stop The Bleed campaign. She has seen firsthand how early action related to stemming the loss of blood after an injury can dramatically improve the likelihood of recovery, or even survival in some instances. She has spent time at the R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center, a freestanding trauma hospital in Baltimore, that is part of the University of Maryland Medical Center, and witnessed how these techniques have made a difference. She points out that there’s a reason that the military makes all new recruits learn these same techniques.

“They recognize that an immediate and appropriate reaction to life-threatening bleeding works,” Park said. “Knowing whether to apply pressure, a pack, or a tourniquet makes a difference.”

People involved with the Stop The Bleed movement are working to have training made available to the public through schools, governmental bodies, private companies, and basically any other group that might be interested. For instance, Georgia has made this type of blood and wound management mandatory as part of its high school health curriculum.

“You feel very empowered when you learn to do something like this,” Park said.

Another part of the campaign is to have blood control kits available in buildings and vehicles. The kits contain scissors, gloves, gauze for packing the wound when simple pressure is not enough, and a tourniquet. Used in the most dire situations, the tourniquet slides over the wound, is fastened into place, and tightened via a plastic rod, which should be spun around until bleeding stops.

“Having those few basic things really helps to save lives. I believe that very firmly, and the military has proven that,” Park added.

There’s another part of this story, and I waited until the end to discuss it because the politics surrounding guns can easily overshadow this important initiative. The Stop The Bleed effort originated after the Sandy Hook Elementary School slayings in Newtown, Conn., in 2012. The American College of Surgeons, with members of the medical community and representatives from the federal government, convened the Joint Committee to Create a National Policy to Enhance Survivability from Intentional Mass Casualty Shooting Events a few months after the mass murder. The goal was to establish the framework to help boost survivability from these mass shootings. Stop The Bleed was a result of these meetings.

This discussion strikes much closer to home for manufacturers considering the events that occurred on Feb. 15 when a worker reporting to a termination meeting at Henry Pratt Co., a valve manufacturer, in Aurora, Ill., opened fire on employees there. He killed five, including a 21-year-old student from nearby Northern Illinois University on his first day at the company as a human resources intern. The gunman also shot four law enforcement officers. This can happen anywhere and probably will happen at some other manufacturing facility in the U.S.

This is the world we live in. We may not be able to stop the injuries and workplace violence, but we should do our best to stop the bleeding and give people a chance to survive their wounds.