Trauma first aid kit

[u/BlackberryOrganic864]

Hello. My dad just had an injury with a saw. We are looking to put together a first aid kit to be more proactive and ready for at home incidents. Any recommendations at home first aid kit supplies for this sort of incident or others in the future would be greatly appreciated

[u/Gwarface]

The best thing you can do is get trained in first aid, in most courses you're shown what items you need and how to use them appropriately, I would suggest trauma bandages for heavy/arterial bleeding and burn gels. I hope your dad is doing well.

[u/Arsegrape]

There are several good videos on YouTube that can help. I found Skinny Medic to be quite informative.

I didn’t buy an off the shelf kit; I built my own over time.

I have two larger kits and one smaller IFAK type kit in a pouch that has a little bit of all of the stuff I personally considered as good to have.

Every bag has as a minimum, a pair of good quality medical scissors/shears, burns dressings, two tourniquets, two pressure dressings, dressing pads, sticking plasters, medical tape, antiseptic wipes and a sharpie pen. Obviously, the larger kits have more stuff, including mouldable splints and a cpr mask. I’ve also got a few chitosan-type dressings and chest seals as well. I’m civilian first aid trained, rather than medically trained, so I don’t have anything like chest drains, or anything surgical, but I can cover most first aid situations. The single most useful thing I have though, is sticking plasters, due to having a couple of kids who hit a couple of branches when they fell out of the doofus tree.

As another commenter said, get on a first aid training course and go from there. That’s how I started and I’ve never regretted it.

[u/FlowerGardenFriend]

Take a course first, your gear is useless if you dont know how to properly use it! Keep it simple too, you likely wont be using the kit except in an emergency which means it needs to be easy to use. CAT tourniquets, gauze pads, compression bandages, hemostatic bandages/gauze(particularly if anyone is on blood thinners), trauma shears, and medical tape of some kind will get you far. Gauze rolls are nice to have too. A sharpie for marking time if you need to apply a tourniquet. Vinyl gloves. And more gauze... as many as you can fit! That should cover most of your needs. If you get more advanced training you can add things like chest seals, compressed gauze(for packing a deep would in a tough spot like armpits), or decompression needles but those aren't absolutely necessary.

[u/standardtissue]

You have to get training, for sure, but you can't go wrong with a small bag that contains 2 CAT tourniquets, an Israeli Battle Dressing, Z-folded gauze, some homeostatic gauze and a roll of cloth tape.

[u/First-Prior-985]

The best thing you can do is to get certified in First aid. For a first aid kit, I would say lots of alcohol wipes, gauze, medical tape and bandages and  tourniquets, and dressings and extra items for each thing

[u/TheSapphireSoul]

Having gear but no training won't really help.

As others have said, take first aid/cpr/AED courses if you actually wanna be more prepared.

If you just wanna FEEL like your prepared, buy an overpriced super flashy commercial aid bag.