Trauma Dressings

Now you're familiar with standard first aid dressings, the likes of the medium dressings which are 15 cm x 15. These are designed for much larger injuries, they could be a bomb blast, amputations, or serious bleeds. They will absorb quite a lot of blood. The important thing when you're using dressings like this is also to think about, do you need to use hemostatic agents? Do you need to use tourniquets? But the dressings themselves, they're all very similar in how they work but the pads that are on the dressings are much, much bigger to cover larger areas.

So what we're going to do now is have just a look at this selection we've got here and see how they look and how you use them. This is the first one we're going to have a look at. You see, it's being shrink-wrapped and it's airtight, and it's sterile. It may look a bit odd when it's all shrink-wrapped like that but you can again tear these or sometimes it's easiest just to cut it off. Once you cut it off, you'll be able to open it up and then remove it from the wrapper. Now this dressing here, you need to unwrap it to start with to see the size of the pad. Now that is the main pad that goes on to the wound. It's very, very large. It's very absorbent and it's good for large areas.

Now, this type of dressing has actually got stretch in it. Now the advantage of a dressing like this is you can apply a lot of pressure on. So if you have to deal with multiple casualties, you can apply this dressing on and then move on to the next injury or the next person. But it's important that if you do put a dressing like this on, and it carries on bleeding these dressings will hold a lot of blood. So you may well have stopped it for now but is this just absorbing the blood and not actually stopping the wound from bleeding? So you need to revisit and make sure you don't forget someone.

Now, this type of dressings has got a very large pad on it and a conventional bandage. This sort of thing you could use on abdomen wound where you've got to cover a large area. So you see, when you open this up and look at the sheer size of the pad, it's much, much bigger for large areas. On here, you have the bandages to hold it in place. They're just basic bandages. You're not really applying pressure like with others but this would be a bandage that you could cover a large area with one dressing.

Now, this is the one that's called a military field dressing. Again, it comes shrink-wrap packed. Here, you've got the large pad on it and you've got a bandage for securing it. And again, this is a stretching bandage so you can apply a lot of pressure to a wound. You can pop the pad on and then tie it off at this end, or you can just secure it with tape once you've actually put it on. But again, take care not to put it on so tight that you cut off all circulation. These are not designed for use as a tourniquet, they're just to stop bleeding, and again, it's a very high absorbency pad so make sure that you keep an eye on the patient to make sure that you're not losing lots of blood without realizing.

Now, this dressing's a standard ambulance dressing. They come in different sizes. This one's a No. 3 Ambulance Dressing, and it works similar to the ones on conventional first aid but as you can see, there's a much, much larger pad on it. Bandaging wheel is there to hold it in place, it's not designed to apply loads, loads of pressure but you will, by just using that bandage be applying pressure. But very large dressing on there. Good for large areas.

Now the last one we're going to look at is a Blast Bandage, and this one's a little bit different. As you unwrap it, you see it clearly states on there which side goes against the wound. But it looks very large, the bandage on the end. The reason with this is, you can use it around other injuries but if you had an amputation, you could pop the dressing over and then you can just fold that around and then the actual bandage would then go around this side so it can stretch, and again it's a stretching bandage, and it's gripping through. So you can actually bandage on an amputation and keep that in place.

As you see, in the dressing is Velcro, so as you're working this through, it does hold itself in place very nicely. You can apply good pressure throughout the injury site, just when you get to the Velcro bit just let that undo. And this you can feel good pressure on the wound, so it's stopping any bleeding. So this can be useful for any injury that you're likely to come across and on the end here you've got a standard clip, and again with Velcro so it holds it nicely tightly in place when you want to secure it in place onto the injury site.