Teacher brings national Stop the Bleed program to Western High School

When Western High School teacher Brian Driscoll first heard news of the attack at the Route 91 Harvest festival on Oct. 1, 2017, he thought hard about how to discuss it with his students the next day.

The Las Vegas educator didn’t feel it was enough to just chat through it, especially as many seniors in his sports medicine class would likely enter the medical field and face emergency situations every day.

“I wanted my students to have a chance to be proactive, rather than reactive,” Driscoll said.

He had an idea of how to do so.

Driscoll decided to tell his students about the Stop the Bleed campaign, a federal initiative encouraging citizens nationwide to become trained and equipped to stop life-threatening bleeding in an emergency before first responders arrive.

“On October 2, I told my students the general idea and said, ‘If you like, we can turn (implementing this) into our senior capstone project,’” Driscoll said. “They unanimously decided to be a part of this and put it together.”

Little did Driscoll know the impact he and his senior students would have, eventually implementing a school-wide Stop the Bleed program that trained over 130 teachers in emergency life-saving skills, stocked the school with top-grade, bleeding-control kits, and provided his students with key education about emergency injuries.

“We were the first school to put (Stop the Bleed) into place in Nevada,” said Driscoll, now working with more Clark County School District schools to follow suit.

These accomplishments resulted in Driscoll being named one of 20 CCSD teachers out of several hundred finalists in 2018 to receive a Heart of Education Award from The Smith Center for the Performing Arts.

This annual awards program honors outstanding teachers with a $5,000 cash prize and a $1,000 donation to their school.

“My goal is for every single school in CCSD, and eventually throughout Nevada, to have these supplies and training available to them,” Driscoll said. “This is emergency equipment that we hope to never have to use, but we want it to be there so we could save a life.”

 

Learning to Save a Life

Abraham Navas, student president of the school’s sports medicine program in fall 2017, immediately thought implementing Stop the Bleed with his class was a useful idea.

“Things can happen even somewhere we think is relatively safe, and it’s necessary and proper to prepare,” Navas said.

The students’ efforts started out simply.

First, they learned life-saving techniques themselves, with Driscoll bringing in medical professionals from UMC to give his class bleeding-control training.

Created as part of the national Stop the Bleed campaign, this hands-on training is designed to provide people outside of the health care profession with the essential tools for stopping life-threatening bleeding.

The training includes how to quickly identify life-threatening bleeding, provide pressure to stem hemorrhaging, apply a tourniquet and pack a wound.

“The most interesting thing I learned was that your chest can fill with air through a puncture in the chest,” Navas said. “The hands-on part was the highlight, because after you research the body, these techniques give you a whole different perspective.”

The seniors quickly decided that just training students wasn’t enough, Driscoll said.

“They realized, ‘This needs to be made available to every teacher,’” he said.

 

Expanding the Vision

Driscoll’s students also determined the school needed to be stocked with specific emergency supplies to address potential bleeding injuries.

“I explained that with both training and supplies, the difficult part would be paying for that,” Driscoll said.

He tasked his students with first compiling a strategy to provide school-wide training and supplies under the Stop the Bleed campaign — then pitching that strategy to the principal to fund its implementation.

The students began with researching medical supplies necessary for bleed-out emergencies, quickly focusing on public-access bleeding-control kits that contain items like a tourniquet, gauze, compress bandage and scissors.

“Those simple tools will allow you to stop hemorrhaging in virtually all cases that involve a limb,” Driscoll said.

Driscoll and his class also examined the best companies to provide these kits for the school. Reviewing product development, studies and company profiles, they eventually landed on North American Rescue, which supplies medical products to the American armed forces overseas.

“We picked the company with the most scientific literature published on their products,” Driscoll said. “A lot of this science has come out of (combat care) in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

 

What It Takes to Save a Life

While compiling their strategy to pitch to the principal, Driscoll’s students learned more than they expected about bleeding injuries, Navas said.

“We learned that someone can fatally bleed out from an injury in just four minutes,” he said.

With this in mind, the students reviewed the school’s emergency action protocols — spanning evacuations, lock-downs and more — and analyzed how to best prepare the campus for addressing a bleed-out injury at any time.

“I made the kids run all over campus to figure out where these bleeding-control kits would need to be, so someone could get the supplies and get back in less than four minutes,” Driscoll said.

Myah Moore, a senior who participated in the project, learned that having emergency supplies on hand is vital because most bleeding injuries occur in everyday events like car accidents, falls and mishaps in the kitchen.

“Bleeding causes people to go into shock and causes organ failure, and that causes more problems for doctors to address,” Moore said. “If you know how to stop the bleeding, that can prevent other major issues from occurring.”

Moore, now attending UNLV to become an athletic trainer, said Driscoll’s project educated her about many topics essential for her future career.

“It was like a next step in my education,” she said. “I realized, ‘One day I could be in a situation where I will need to save a life.’”

 

The Big Pitch

The students compiled a PowerPoint presentation with their overall strategy for implementing Stop the Bleed, and rehearsed it repeatedly before pitching the principal.

“Mr. Driscoll assured us the worst that could happen is the principal would say no,” Moore said.

But when Principal Monica Cortez saw their presentation — including an “impressive” demonstration of applying a tourniquet — she says she was quickly convinced to fund the program with the school’s Strategic Budget.

“The turning point was the research the students conducted of the actual material cost, relative to the cost of a life,” Cortez said. “Our students brought forward a solution with a plan of action, that saving a limb or a life far outweighs the dollar expense.”

 

Rolling Out the Campaign

The school implemented the students’ proposed Stop the Bleed program within a matter of months, with UMC returning to provide the same hands-on, bleeding-control training for over 130 teachers.

Western High School teacher Cheryl Gavin says all of the teachers took the UMC training seriously.

“I walked away from the training feeling that I would be able to help individuals in need,” Gavin said. “I believe it was one of the most beneficial and meaningful trainings I have been to in all of my years of teaching.”

Under the program, every Western High School teacher has also been allotted an emergency backpack stocked with North American Rescue’s public-access, bleeding-control kits.

These backpacks accompany teachers everywhere, including during evacuations and lock-downs.

Gavin believes her backpack could come in handy for a wide range of situations.

“I feel that it is critical to have the materials that would be necessary to help my students or colleagues at arm’s reach,” she said.

The school has also been strategically stocked with bleeding-control kits in several key locations like the library, athletic fields and cafeteria, Driscoll said.

“If there were a major event, such as bleachers collapsing, we would have those 8-Packs available to grab quickly,” he said.

The Next Steps

Also a licensed athletic trainer at Western High School, Driscoll has worked to help other CCSD athletic trainers also receive UMC’s bleeding-control training.

“They passed it on to their schools, and by the end of last school year, several other schools had teachers who were taught these skills,” he said.

Cassandra Trummel, UMC’s trauma outreach and injury prevention program coordinator, hails Western High School’s campaign as “very proactive.”

Stop the Bleed can be beneficial for any organization to implement, she says, even beyond schools.

“In any emergent situation, there will always be a lag time before first responders can get to you,” Trummel said. “Everyone should know how to control life-threatening bleeding, potentially saving themselves or someone else.”

 

Get Involved

Trummel encourages any organizations interested in pursuing bleeding-control training to contact her at [email protected].

“I am so very proud of the initiative that Western High School took by providing this training for its faculty,” she said.

You can nominate CCSD teachers for The Smith Center’s fourth-annual Heart of Education Awards

through Jan. 18, 2019, at TheHeartofEducation.org.

Alecia Westmorland is the communications manager for the Smith Center for the Performing Arts.

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