Kathleen E Jones*

Invest in Nursing Nurse Educator Fellowship, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

*Corresponding Author: Kathleen E Jones, Invest In Nursing Nurse Educator Fellowship, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.

Received: July 09, 2021 ; Published: September 20, 2021

Abstract

  Violence is on the rise in America. Since the start of 2021, in the United States there have been 232 shootings, up from the 2013 number of 166 mass shootings, with around an astonishing 43,000 deaths by gun violence in 2020 per GunViolenceArchives.org. Much has been learned from each tragic event such as faster response time for medical help, learning how to instruct lay people in the community to help those injured on the scene, how to survive an active shooter event, and the need for the survivors to seek out mental health services in the afterward of such a horrific event. At one time the current practice revolved around combat care, then it transitioned to a very different practice, but it has once again returned to a military-based on-scene care. There has been the emergence of stressing this knowledge of skills by the Stop the Bleed (STB) campaign, which teaches lay people with no medical background, how to care for victims by calling 911, to identify the severity of the bleeding, to use of tourniquets, compression, packing of wounds, and reducing the risk of death. STB is a very successful program. However, when one looks back at the targets of vicious shootings, schools are a commonplace as 38 percent of shootings occur in schools. Currently, there is no education program for teenagers or children, yet they are the first ones at the scene and if they were equipped with knowledge, perhaps they could save lives. A presentation was done with teenagers in a North Carolina high school in Hickory successfully. Elementary school age children were then considered as a pilot for how young a responder could be. The sample size of four children ages six years-old to nine years-old were examined. The hypothesis answered is how young can a successful participant be for the Stop the Bleed education program? In conclusion, it is noted that children are underused in emergent situations and can be trained effectively with optimal long-term recollection of skills taught at nine years of age. 

Keywords: Children; Teaching; Trauma Skills; Active Hemorrhage; Mass Casualty

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Citation

Citation: Kathleen E Jones. “Future First Responders can be as Young as Nine Years Old”. Acta Scientific Women's Health 3.10 (2021): 30-34.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2021 Kathleen E Jones. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.