Shreveport Fire Department gives safety tips for Stop the Bleed campaign

SHREVEPORT, La. (KSLA) - Shreveport Police Department and Shreveport Fire Department are teaming up for a national awareness campaign.

Stop the Bleed is a campaign that trains the public to help in an emergency where a person is bleeding before professional help arrives. The purpose is to better prepare individuals to save lives by raising awareness of basic actions to stop life threatening bleeding.

Officers and firefighters are taught how to treat people if they are injured with a bleeding wound. SFD says it’s helped save many lives, often times by officers who make it to the scene before medics.

“It helped in something as recent as this mass shooting that we had downtown. The officers were able to get on scene, were able to make sure the scene was safe and start applying tourniquets and start packing those wounds,” Craig Menefee, of Shreveport Fire Department, said. “That way when EMS got there, that’s a shorter scene time for us. And that way we can hurry up and get those individuals to the level 1 care that Oschner LSU provides.”

Menefee goes on demonstrate how to tie a tourniquet. If you don’t have a tourniquet, use a towel and apply pressure until emergency help arrives.

“Well a lot of times people may get stressed out or whatever the case may be, and their first instinct may not be to call 911. Well if they know how do to do this, they can either grab that dish towel or whatever they have to hold pressure on that wound, and go ahead and either improvise that tourniquet or use a commercial tourniquet while someone’s calling 911.”

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