Children could be taught how to stop 'life-threatening' bleeding from stab wounds or car crashes in school

Children could be taught how to stop 'life-threatening' bleeding from stab wounds or car crashes in school Former trauma co-ordinator Neil Shastri-Hurst warned that someone could bleed to death before an ambulance arrives. His bill would add training on severe bleeding to the lifesaving skills already taught in schools Schools could begin teaching children how to help someone with life-threatening bleeding after a stabbing or car crash under plans being debated by MPs. The proposed lessons would show pupils how to recognise a severe bleed and respond while waiting for an ambulance. They would add to the lifesaving skills already taught in schools, including CPR. Conservative MP Neil Shastri-Hurst, who put forward the Bill, said a person could bleed to death in less time than it takes an ambulance to arrive. The MP said: “It’s about stop the bleed training. In a similar way that we have created a critical mass of individuals who know how to do CPR when somebody has a cardiac arrest, and that is in one way, shape or form embedded in the curriculum. Kids leave school knowing that. “If we can train a critical mass in terms of how to recognise catastrophic bleeding and how to deal with it, that is going to save a huge number of lives, because the average time for, even in an emergency, an ambulance to come is about eight-and-a-half minutes. But you can bleed out in four.” The MP for Solihull West and Shirley previously worked as an honorary consultant trauma co-ordinator at Birmingham’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital and served as a major in the British Army. He said he had seen people arrive at the hospital with devastating injuries and believed help at the scene could have changed some of their outcomes. He added: “I would see people coming into a major trauma centre at the QE in Birmingham, one of the regional trauma centres that we have in this country, in the most acute extremis and if some of those individuals had intervention at the scene prior to an ambulance arriving and that paramedic or pre-hospital care being delivered, it is entirely foreseeable that some of those individuals who didn’t survive, may have survived. It would have given them a fighting chance. This is literally one of those scenarios where minutes matter.” Shastri-Hurst said the lessons could help children respond to serious bleeding caused by anything from a road collision to a sporting injury or a terror attack. They would learn to put pressure on a wound to slow the bleeding and what to do if that was not enough. He pointed to a session run by charity Citizen Aid, in which he and a small group of volunteers trained 1,000 children at one school in a day. The charity was founded by trauma surgeon Sir Keith Porter and former armed forces surgeon general Major General Tim Hodgetts. His Emergency and Life-Saving Skills (Schools) Bill was listed for debate in Parliament on Friday. It would need further support to become law. Shastri-Hurst said: “It’s giving people the confidence not just to know what to do, but have the confidence to put that into action. It’s a low-tech set of training, you can do most of it with a drainpipe, a bit of foam and, as I say, a tie or a bandage or a handkerchief and a spoon. “You can do the basic training on stop the bleed in about 10-15 minutes. They then go and explain it to their families, and all of a sudden you are building up a critical mass of individuals who know how to do it.” He added: “It’s around building up our national resilience, and part of that national resilience is having a society that knows how to respond in an emergency.”