Hunting

What actually injures people out hunting

The gunshot wound is the one everyone thinks of. The common injury is a different one: knife cuts during gralloching and butchering, often to the thigh or hand, sometimes deep enough to reach a vessel. Add to that falls in rough terrain, chainsaws and quad bikes, dog bites and heavy external bleeding from open fractures.

What they all have in common is not the mechanism of injury but the distance. An ambulance called out to hunting grounds rarely has a road to the scene, mobile coverage is often poor, and it is dark for half the season. The time from injury to hospital is measured in tens of minutes to hours — and that is precisely the span in which a heavy bleed is decided.

The order: bleeding first

With heavy external bleeding it comes before everything else, before the airway and before breathing. The reason is simple: an arterial bleed in a thigh can become life-threatening within minutes, while the other problems take longer to kill.

• Tourniquet — for heavy bleeding from an arm or a leg. Applied high on the limb, tightened until the bleeding stops, and left in place. Note the time. A properly tightened tourniquet hurts; that means it is sitting correctly, not that it should be loosened.
• Haemostatic dressing — where a tourniquet cannot sit: groin, armpit, neck, torso. The dressing is packed down into the wound cavity against the source of the bleeding, not laid on top, and held with firm pressure for at least three minutes.
• Pressure dressing — for bleeding that can be controlled with pressure against the underlying tissue.
• Chest seal — for a hole in the chest wall. The vented version lets air out without letting it in.

The method in full is set out in the guide Stopping a bleed — how to do it in the right order, and the hunting-specific part in First aid for hunting.

What you should carry — and where

A kit sitting in the car by the road helps nobody standing at a post a kilometre in. The basic rule is that bleeding control kit is carried on the body by each person, while the larger kit can stay in the hunting bag or on the quad bike.

• On the body: a tourniquet, one haemostatic dressing, a pair of gloves.
• In the bag: chest seals, spare haemostatic dressings, bandages, gauze swabs, tape.
• Cutting tools to reach the injury through hunting clothing — outdoor fabric is heavy and ordinary scissors are not enough.
• Something to keep the casualty warm. An injured person lying still out in the field cools down even above freezing, and cooling makes bleeding worse.

The whole trauma range is under trauma and first aid, with every model of tourniquet gathered in one place. If the party is to be equipped in one go — request a quote.