Extremity Tourniquet Training at High Seas

BackgroundFuture navy officers require unique training for emergency medical response in the isolated maritime environment. The authors issued a workshop on injury classification and extremity bleeding control, using four different commercial extremity tourniquets onboard a training sail ship. The purpose was to assess participants' perceptions of this educational experience and evaluate application simplicity while navigating on high seas.MethodsA descriptive observational study was conducted as part of a workshop issued to volunteer sailors. A post-workshop survey collected participants` perceptions about the workshops' content usefulness and adequacy, tourniquet safety, application simplicity in high seas, and device preference. The studied variables were measured on a one-to-ten Likert scale, while tourniquet preference by frequency count. Frequencies and percentages were calculated for the studied variables, and application simplicity means compared using the ANOVA test (p<0,05).ResultsFifty-one Spanish training naval officers, aged from 20-21, perceived workshop content usefulness, adequacy, and safety level in high sea use at 8.6/10, 8.7/10, and 7.5/10, respectively. As for application simplicity, CAT and SAM-XT were rated equally with a mean of 8.5, followed by SWAT (7.9) and RATS (6.9). The only statistical difference found was for the RATS (p<0.01). Windlass models were preferred by 94%, and elastic tourniquets by 6%. ConclusionsThe training sail ship extremity bleeding control workshop was perceived as useful and its content adequate by the participating midshipmen. Windlass tourniquet types were regarded as easier to apply than elastics models and were the preferred model by nine out of every ten participants.