Medical equipment has been designed for people without medical experience by Brigadier Tim Hodgetts CBE, a Birmingham surgeon who has worked in war zones and is renowned for dealing with combat injuries. The brigadier, who served as the Queen’s Honorary Physician for six years, has helped set up the citizenAID charity to empower everyday people not to panic after a terrorist attack but to “know what to do” to save lives.
SP Services, of Telford, is ready to supply thousands of lightweight tourniquets for use in public places in the event of a bomb, shooting or knife attack. The firm also supplies medical and humanitarian equipment to war zones and is a supplier to the NHS and MoD. SP MD Steve Bray says: “He is a quite remarkable man and SP Services is very proud indeed to have been chosen as the sole distributor to work with citizenAID to supply medical equipment to public organisations.”
The brigadier said: “Experience has taught us there is a predictable delay between an attack taking place and professional help reaching the injured. This means those within the incident, the public, are the ones who can make the difference in saving life from severe bleeding. Its unique design allows the tourniquet to be quickly secured. As a low-cost alternative, there is a realistic opportunity to make this life saving skill more widely available and to empower a critical mass of the public and first responders.”
The Tourni-Key is a 13cm long yellow plastic tool with a small hole at one end and a hook at the other. It enables the user to apply pressure and stop profuse bleeding which can kill victims quickly.
In the US, a tourniquet saved the life of country music lover Daisy Bautista (39) who was caught up in the Las Vegas shooting in October last year. Controversy has surrounded its use in recent years with the belief that the injured can lose a limb if a tourniquet is applied wrongly by the untrained.
But more than 200,000 US police officers were trained to use it after the mass murder of schoolchildren at Sandy Hook in 2012 and they are now commonly available in shopping malls and airports next to defibrillators.
citizenAID has developed a free app giving the public advice on what to do in the event of a terrorist attack. The new Tourni-Key is available from SP Services (UK) Ltd, Hortonwood 30, Telford, Shropshire, or at www.spservices.co.uk/tourni-key.
Brigadier Tim Hodgetts demonstrates to Steve Bray how the Tourni-key works https://www.spservices.co.uk/item/citizenAID_NEWTourni-KeywithAnti-PinchCard_205_107_6149_1.html and talks about citizenAID here: https://vimeo.com/190709838.
