A doctor who helped treat soldiers during the battle that inspired the book and movie “Black Hawk Down” is touting the importance of blood availability.
Dr. John Holcomb says it is important to have the blood available before patients are taken to the hospital based on what he learned in that battle in Mogadishu. “Stopping bleeding is really important and filling the tank with blood is really important and it was different from what I had been taught through my medical school years my residency,” he says. “I was taught that give blood late and did not use tourniquets. And what I learned in that episode was to give blood early and use tourniquets.”
Holcomb spoke Wednesday in Sioux City about the protocols he developed for using blood based on that experience. Holcomb says he lives in a rural area seven miles outside of the town of Burton, Texas. “I made sure that my E-M-S agency in that county, Washington County, has blood. This issue of rural versus urban, it’s all the same. If I cut my leg with my chainsaw or if I roll over a tractor, I’m just as bad off as somebody in inner city who gets a gunshot wound. It’s the same, if you’re in shock, you need blood,” Holcomb says.
Eric Banks is helping develop the strategies to get blood to people quicker. “Even if there’s a delay for us to get to the farm accident, it’s still going to be far sooner than when the patient gets to the hospital,” he says. “We’ve been able to work on these strategies of how to do deployment, how to keep the product stable, to use it in the field, how to get it to where it needs to be, how to warm it back up, how to rotate it, how to be very good stewards of blood supply.”
Holcomb says it’s a more critical issue for rural areas because of the time it takes crews to respond to emergency calls. “You actually need blood more in rural areas than in urban areas, but now the frequency of the delivery of transfusion is probably less than the rural area than it is in an urban area, just with population density. But the distances and the times to get into the hospital are much longer,” Holcomb says.
Banks says they’ve talked with the Blood Center in Des Moines to get a pilot program going here. “We know what the scope is at the state level because we’ve been working with them to actually adjust that. It’s basically just understanding the region that’s in and what we need and what changes we need to make and then what training we need to do and how we can help the folks get this off the ground,” he says.
Dr. Holcomb says the 1993 Black Hawk Down tragedy was the catalyst for him to support pre-hospital blood initiatives. He says blood is currently only available in two percent of ground ambulances in the U-S, and the effort is trying to change that.
