Bleeding Control Training: Stop the Bleed for Workplaces
A short course that gives ordinary people a skill they can rely on. For workplaces, schools, and houses of worship, taught by an ASPP™ Community of Experts instructor.
Bleeding control is the most learnable lifesaving skill there is, and the one your people are most likely to actually use.
It takes an afternoon to learn, and it works on the ordinary emergencies too: the workshop accident, the broken glass, the kitchen injury. Serious bleeding is time sensitive, which sounds like a problem and is actually the opportunity. The people already in your building are the ones who will be standing there, and once they know what to do, they are enough.
That is the whole idea. Not fear, and not waiting for someone else to arrive. Capability, in the hands of people who already care about the place they work.
Why this training exists
The medical community reached this conclusion formally. The Hartford Consensus, convened by the American College of Surgeons, identified external hemorrhage as the most preventable cause of death in the prehospital setting. That word is the important one. Of everything that can go wrong before professional help arrives, this is the one an untrained bystander can most reliably put right. In one reviewed series, hemorrhage accounted for 55 percent of the deaths judged potentially survivable, which is another way of saying most of them were within reach of someone standing nearby.
That finding is why the Stop the Bleed® campaign was launched in 2015 by the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma to train bystanders rather than wait for clinicians. It is the same reasoning that sits underneath the P.R.O. Model™: prevention and response both depend on the people who are already there.
Training and equipment work as a pair
This is the most common gap we find on assessment, and it is almost never deliberate. A facility trains its staff and never buys equipment. Or it mounts kits on the wall and never trains anyone to open them. Both halves are inexpensive, and together they are one of the highest-value things a building can put in place.
| Training without equipment | Equipment without training | |
|---|---|---|
| What you have | People who know exactly what to do and nothing to do it with | A sealed cabinet nobody is confident enough to open |
| How it fails | Silently, through staff turnover. Forty trained, twelve left, nobody recounted | Expiry, theft, and placement. The kit is real and it is four minutes away |
| Outcome | Trained witnesses | Unused inventory |
The ASPP™ risk model scores this the way it actually works. A facility with one half of the pair receives credit for neither. Not reduced credit. None. A tourniquet nobody is trained to use is inventory, and a trained responder with no tourniquet is a witness.
What the evidence shows
The case for bystander bleeding control did not start in an office. It came home from two decades of combat medicine, where the tourniquet moved from a last resort to a first line intervention and hemorrhage deaths fell as a result. The civilian data followed the same track.
In Civilian Prehospital Tourniquet Use Is Associated with Improved Survival in Patients with Peripheral Vascular Injury, published in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons in May 2018, researchers reviewed 1,026 patients with peripheral vascular injuries admitted to eleven Level I trauma centers over six years. Prehospital tourniquets had been applied in 181 of them. Tourniquet use was independently associated with a six-fold reduction in mortality.
And the objection everyone raises did not hold. The worry about tourniquets has always been the limb. In this study, delayed amputation rates were statistically no different between patients who got a prehospital tourniquet and those who did not, at 1.1 percent in both groups. The tourniquet saved lives without costing limbs.
Two things follow. The skill matters more than the credential, because these were tourniquets applied before EMS arrival, which means applied by whoever was already there. And the equipment had to be within reach, because every one of them was physically present in the minute it was needed. That is the matched pair, and it is why we decline to score one half without the other.
It is also why the scale of the effort matters. The Stop the Bleed® campaign launched in October 2015 following a White House call to action, with the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma running the national training effort. By 2025 the ACS reported it had prepared more than four million people to stop severe bleeding.
How many people, not whether anyone
It is worth knowing what the research says about ordinary people and tourniquets, because it points straight at how a building should plan.
Studies of laypersons find that roughly one in five people with no training apply a tourniquet correctly, and that handing someone the printed instructions does not rescue it. After Stop the Bleed® training that figure rises to roughly half to sixty percent, and it declines again over the following months without a refresher.
Read that the right way and it is encouraging. Training roughly triples the odds, and the decline afterward is not a flaw in people. It is how every perishable skill behaves, and the fix is a refresher on the calendar, which costs almost nothing.
It does settle one design question, though. One trained person is a coin flip. A trained population is a capability. A casualty needs someone competent within arm’s reach in the first minute, and the only reliable way to arrange that is to train enough people that the odds run in your favor. That is why we ask what share of your staff is trained rather than whether anyone holds a certificate.
What the training covers
The ASPP™ Hemorrhagic Bleeding Control program prepares participants to respond to life threatening bleeding in their own workspace. The objective is confidence: knowing what to expect, and having the practical skill to act inside the window that matters. Students learn five techniques:
- Direct pressure with your hands. The first and most immediately available intervention, and often the one that holds until help arrives.
- Wound packing. For wounds where pressure alone cannot reach the source of the bleeding.
- Applying a pressure bandage. Converting hands-on pressure into something sustainable so the responder can move or manage a second casualty.
- Correct tourniquet application. Correct is the operative word. A tourniquet applied wrongly is a tourniquet that does not work.
- Applying a chest seal. For penetrating chest trauma, where the failure mode is different and faster.
Course note: this training includes graphic content. Participants are advised in advance, and the material is presented professionally rather than for shock.
Who teaches it
Rob Laver is a public safety professional with over 29 years as a Firefighter and EMT. He serves as an Emergency Manager specializing in emergency planning and the development and implementation of Occupant Emergency Plans, Active Shooter Plans, and first aid training. He is an instructor in CPR and hemorrhagic bleeding control for both federal government and private sector audiences, a Stop the Bleed® instructor, and a member of the ASPP™ Community of Experts.
Who this is for
| Setting | Why it applies |
|---|---|
| Workplaces and offices | Industrial accidents, glass injuries, and violence all produce the same problem. Most offices have a first aid kit built for paper cuts. |
| Schools and campuses | Staff are the adults present. Response time to a classroom is longer than five minutes in most districts. |
| Houses of worship | Large gatherings, volunteer staffing, and limited on-site medical capability. |
| Manufacturing and trades | Machinery injuries are hemorrhage injuries. This training pays for itself outside any violence scenario. |
| Federal and municipal facilities | Frequently mandated, and frequently satisfied on paper only. |
Where this fits in the P.R.O. Model™
We are plain about that. Bleeding control is not prevention, and ASPP™ does not sell it as prevention. Prevention is a threat assessment team, a reporting channel, and people trained to notice what they see, and that is where the real work lives. Bleeding control is the last layer, and a building that has it is one that has looked after its people all the way down.
Course description
The full Hemorrhagic Bleeding Control course description is available as a download.
Download the ASPP™ Hemorrhagic Bleeding Control course description (PDF)
Common questions
Do we need equipment before we train?
No, but you should not stop at training. The two are scored together for a reason. Most clients arrange both at once, and we can introduce you directly to the supply side.
Is this the same as Stop the Bleed®?
Stop the Bleed® is the national campaign run by the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma. Our instructor is a Stop the Bleed® instructor and the techniques taught are the recognized ones. ASPP™ does not own or govern the campaign.
Our staff are not medical people.
That is the entire point. The campaign exists because bystanders, not clinicians, are the ones present. The skills are deliberately simple enough to be retained by people who will hopefully never use them.
How many kits do we need, and where?
The working standard we assess against is reachable in under ninety seconds from anywhere staff gather. That usually means more units than a client expects and a different placement than they assumed.
Does this count for insurance or grant purposes?
Documented training and equipment strengthen the record you present to insurers, boards, and grant programs. Carriers make their own underwriting decisions. A facility with a documented, paired capability presents very differently from one without.
The next step
Tell us the building and the headcount. We will tell you what training and equipment actually fit, and what it would take to close the gap. That conversation costs nothing.
National Violence Prevention Hotline: (888) 664-6652. Free and confidential, for anyone struggling with violent thoughts or worried about someone else.
ASPP™ delivers preparedness and response training. This page is educational and is not medical advice. Stop the Bleed® is a registered campaign of the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma; ASPP™ instructors participate in it and do not govern it.
