By Tracy Ouellette
Staff Writer
Police officers are usually the first on the scene when a car crashes or there has been a severe industrial accident causing injury.
It often falls to law enforcement personnel to render first aid until the EMTs arrive. Sometimes, that aid can mean the difference between life and death.
Fontana Police Chief Steve Olson said when someone is bleeding out seconds count and having the proper medical supplies can save lives.
Olson said he was at a training meeting last year when the subject of medical training and supplies came up and how the departments could improve response and serve the community better.
“It came out that while a lot of police departments have tourniquets in their first aid kits and squad cars, not many officers have them with them all the time,” Olson said. “I knew a company that had supplied medical equipment in the past, so I contacted the company and asked if they would be interested and they said it sounded like a good idea to them.”
Walworth County law enforcement agencies have been awarded a $5,570 grant from Enbridge Energy, Superior, through its Community Investment Program, to purchase trauma tourniquets to be used by police in the field.
The grant will cover the cost of 240 tourniquets to be distributed to area police departments and the Walworth County Sheriff’s Department. The tourniquets are the same type used by the U.S. Armed Forces, Olson said.
Olson said the goal is for every officer in Walworth County to have a trauma tourniquet on hand at all times.
“I asked every department and they told me how many they wanted,” Olson said. “The (Walworth County) Sheriff’s Department asked for 90 and Mukwonago asked for something like 10 or 14; they all got exactly what they needed.”
The Village of Sharon Police Department received a total of 10 tourniquets, nine for use in squads and one to be used for training purposes.
“Twice in Walworth County in the past year, I believe, people were operating chain saws and were injured and needed them,” Olson said. “That’s the type of situation where I would most commonly expect to see them used in industrial accidents, car crashes, that type of thing.”
Village of Sharon Police Chief Brad Buchholz said having read in the past they should be used as last resorts, due to the potential for irreversible nerve damage, he thinks tourniquets will be a huge benefit for the department now that medical experts have reversed this thinking.
“They say that if you can use those tourniquets in a short amount of time, you can save limbs,” he said. “They’ve reversed that whole thinking that it was something you would lose as a last resort and now they’re saying do it right away.”
Olson said the officers in his department had been trained on the proper usage of the tourniquets and he said he expected other agencies would institute training sessions if and where needed.
Buchholz said Village of Sharon officers will be undergoing training from EMS at a departmental training within the next couple of weeks.
Other area police departments receiving trauma tourniquets include: Village of East Troy, Town of Geneva, Village of Genoa City, City of Lake Geneva, Village of Mukwonago, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, City of Whitewater and Village of Walworth.
“We want to especially thank Enbridge Energy for their generosity,” Olson said. “If we ever hear anyone in the county now that had to use a tourniquet, it probably came from the grant program and Enbridge Energy’s donation.”
Editor Kellen Olshefski contributed to this article.
