Columbia, SC (WLTX) - School nurses from all over South Carolina come to Columbia to educate others when it comes to "stopping the bleed" in an emergency situation.
"Bleeding is the number one cause of death in trauma patients, the number one cause of preventable death," says Rich Wisniewski with DHEC.
In this two-hour class called "Stop-the-Bleed," school nurses are learning how to train others in emergency procedures.
Wisniewski says, "They receive some pretty specific instruction on the injuries that need a tourniquet, or other type of bleeding control."
Taylor Gilseth, a school nurse with Lexington Richland 5, says her work in the E.R. has taught to handle a medical crisis like someone bleeding out.
Gilseth says, "I just hope that as a nurse, I can stay prepared in emergency situations, and then I can also prepare other people who might not be medical professionals. So that if something like this does happen, everyone is trained, and everyone will know what they have to do to save a life."
Just like all the school nurses who attended this class, Gilseth will go back to her district and train the entire staff, because if something were to happen in school, they would need all the help they could get.
She says, "With school starting back next month, we will go ahead and set up training with all the teacher staff members. Not just teachers, cafeteria workers, all the after-school staff. Ideally I hopefully would be there in an emergency situation, but that's not going to be ideal in every situation. So it's good to have another set of hands to be able to do something if needed."
And hopefully, just by having the most basic of life saving knowledge, the entire school staff can help out in an emergency.
Wisniewski says, "We want to make sure people are prepared, and really the initiative in to achieve zero preventable deaths, and we can do that by bleeding control."