Post-traumatic bleeding control: a descriptive analysis about the Stop the Bleed campaign amongst Tuscan emergency nurses

Introduction: external bleeding, while representing a preventable cause of death, is responsible for over 5 million deaths a year worldwide. However, knowledge on first aid methods remains scarce among the population; in the aim of educate professionals and citizens on bleeding control techniques, the American College of Surgeons has proposed the Stop the Bleed (STB) campaign. In Italy, military, civilian and health personnel integrated themselves only in recent times to extent knowledge about the basic bleeding control techniques. Therefore, we proposed this study to investigate the awareness of health care professionals and highlight possible areas for improvement. Materials and methods: a descriptive survey, which involved emergency nurses of a Tuscan health agency, was carried out using a self-constructed questionnaire on the STB campaign. Results: most of the nurses reported knowing the STB protocol but a fifth of them never heard about bleeding control techniques during their studies; in fact, most of the interviewees met the STB protocol only in post-basic training courses. About one third of the nurses has used the STB protocol. The participants considered it important to spread the availability of bleeding control kits and to train all emergency medical services professionals. Discussion and conclusions: extensive STB training programs, including high-fidelity simulators and distance learning, have already been developed in US and UK high schools. Therefore, it seems appropriate to increase the coverage of STB campaign in italian high schools, universities and in people at risk of external bleeding. A widespread provision of bleeding control kits and the process monitoring with a dashboard seems also appropriate to plan.