Dublin Students Develop Emergency Blood Loss Trainings

DUBLIN, CA — Two students at Dublin High School’s Biomedical Academy have started a training program to teach their fellow students how to stop severe bleeding in the case of a shooting emergency.

Students Seoyun Kim and Natalie Budiman have founded an initiative called “Stop The Bleed: School Shooting Emergency Preparedness” that has hosted two sessions attended by a total of 72 students. Attendees were trained on how to recognize severe, life-threatening bleeding, and how to quickly treat it as they wait for emergency personnel.

“School shootings are a distinctly American phenomenon. Eighty to ninety percent of all the school shootings in the world occur in America, so that further convinced us that students need to be educated about what to do when they are placed in a dangerous environment with an active shooter on campus,” founder Seoyun Kim told Patch.

There were 46 school shootings in the United States in 2022, higher than any year since 1999, according to The Washington Post. In fact, there have been 380 school shootings in the States since the infamous Columbine massacre. As of May 2, more than 13,900 people in the United States died of gun violence in 2023 alone, according to ABC News. Every day, 12 children in the United States die of gun violence, while another 32 are shot and injured, according to The New England Journal of Medicine.

If bleeding isn’t controlled quickly, victims may lose too much blood and develop shock, a series of debilitating physical conditions that occur when the body isn’t getting enough oxygen to vital organs.

During their freshman year, Kim and Budiman learned methods to stop bleeding like packing and pressure using models, but realized that only fellow Biomedical Academy students were learning these methods. They decided to teach the trainings throughout their school, and expand the scope of the training.

“We wanted to make this lesson more situational-based, because we’re teaching situational awareness on what to do in case of an emergency,” Kim said. “For instance, when we’re talking about which types of material to use to stop bleeding, some things you can use instead of sterile gauze is a rag or a piece of your clothes.”

Kim and Budiman were not able to provide kits to every student due to cost, but one kit was available for every four to five students, who practiced using it. In the future, they hope to add this training to the mandatory annual lockdown drills at the high school.

Dublin High School holds two active shooter drills each year, according to DUSD spokesperson Chip Dehnert. Officers from Dublin Police Services attend the drills and debrief school officials afterward. Dublin police also hosted two FBI-developed “Run.Hide.Fight” training sessions for how to respond to an active shooter event.

Dublin High School also has School Resource Officers, six CPR-trained campus supervisors, and a full-time, CPR-trained Healthcare Service Assistant, according to Dehnert. Biomed Academy used to host CPR training, but that was put on hold during the pandemic. School leadership recently decided to bring it back into the sophomore curriculum.

See here for basic information from the Mayo Clinic on how to respond to a person with severe bleeding wounds.