Prioritising first aid

Now, we are going to have a look at multiple injuries and first aid, often when you are doing a standard first aid course, you look at one injury. So you might have a cut to the arm and it might have an amputation if you're doing more advanced courses or a knife injury. But this is one of our trauma mannequins, and obviously, this person has had, very much, a bad day, but you have got lots of different injuries on the one patient. So what you need to do is start to prioritize and deal with what you are dealing with.

So obviously, we need to maintain the breathing, so let's just assume in this case that breathing is not an issue, blood loss is the key one here. So you need to be making some decisions, how are you going to be treating each one of these injuries, which is severe, which are not, which are causing the most blood loss. So your key area is blood loss, to start with. So maybe, these amputations are causing a lot of blood loss straight away. This leg is not much better, it has got some very serious injuries on it. So maybe we need to put tourniquets on one, or even both, of those, get them dressed up, and maybe use hemostatic dressings. Maybe a burn up the top here, could be a lower priority, albeit it is a very serious case, but is it gonna kill them immediately? Whereas some of these others may well do.

Now you've obviously got loads and loads of other risks here, from infection, from blood loss in there, and dealing with something like this can be extremely frightening when you look at, "Maybe, one day I might have to deal with something like this in a bomb blast or a terrorist... Or something like that." But when you do get these, I promise you, your training will kick in and what we will cover on courses. We look at all sorts of different injuries, but what we found when we are talking to people afterwards who do have to deal with this sort of thing, is they go into autopilot, the training kicks back into their mind and they get on and deal with it.

So something like this, you are going to need to prioritize, which is the key thing. Look at what you are dealing with, try and assess very quickly to make sure which ones are the most life-threatening and deal with them accordingly. If you do need to get a tourniquet on this leg and this leg, get it on as quick as possible, so that we can stop that bleed. And then we know, as far as we are concerned, this end is okay, it has got the tourniquet on. Yes, there is a very serious cut here, but is it bleeding badly? Maybe we can just pop a trauma dressing on. One of the big concerns here will be the knife. So we may need to stabilize that. With this patient, it is not someone we could easily move or anything like that, we need to stabilize them where they are and try and make sure that we get the right messages across.

Now, in event of something, a major blast or a major instance, this might be just one of many patients looking very similar or with lots of other injuries on them, so that comes down to your individual triage. But if you were dealing with this patient and you are trying to make sure you are treating the best you possibly can, you can still get other bystanders to help other people. Because in the event of a major instance, it may well be that it does take time for the emergency services to be able to get to, in that emergency.

So the more we look at each one of these individual items, the more competence you will have in dealing with it. So on other videos, you will see how to deal with burns, how to deal with open fractures and knife injuries and amputations and bullet wounds and things like that. So think about those, but when you deal with someone, it may be that you have got a casualty with multiple injuries.