Evaluation of the Efficacy of Various types of Tourniquets Utilizing an Exsanguinating Limb Simulator Model

Publication Date

July 2019

Location

LSU Health Medical Education Building

Document Type

Abstract

Start Date

26-7-2019 9:00 AM

End Date

26-7-2019 12:00 PM

Description

Tourniquets are devices that encircle a wounded limb or tissue and prevent the blood flow by tightening around major arteries and veins. Tourniquets have been in use for centuries and have proven effective at hemorrhage control in numerous settings, from battlefields to modern intraoperative applications. There are many different producers of commercially-available tourniquets such as the Military Emergency Tourniquet (MET), Combat Application Tourniquet (CAT), Israeli Silicon Tourniquet (IST), SWAT Tourniquet, Special Operations Forces Tourniquet (SOF-T), SOF-T Wide and Mechanical Advantage Tourniquet (MAT), all of which take slightly different design approaches to achieve effective circumferential compression of a limb to achieve cessation of distal blood flow. Despite the widespread use of tourniquets, new national efforts to educate the lay public in their use are relatively new. Recent studies have shown that tourniquets work differently. Recently, there has been a “Stop the Bleed Campaign” that has promoted awareness and provides a training opportunity to learn the proper usage of this technique. However, testing the effective usage of different tourniquets in the lay population has not yet been conducted. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of two types of tourniquets including the CAT (older and the newer version) and IST tourniquet on an exsanguinating limb simulator (ELS) to determine which one is most effective. An ELS was constructed from commercially available materials to simulate a human limb. Physicians and nurses were timed and data were collected on (1) time it takes to tighten the tourniquet until cessation of flow, (2) speed of application of tourniquets, and (3) subjective ease of use. Due to the novelty of our study, results are pending and will be presented at a later date. It is a process that we started fairly recent and data is still being collected. Our research team plans to use not only this model but to incorporate patients and lay people into the study by teaching them how to use tourniquets in emergencies. We plan to compare patients’ ability to apply tourniquets to those of physicians and nurses. Eventually, we will compare the efficacy of the tourniquets on the ELS model against the tourniquets on actual people to determine efficiency of the model.

Comments

Mentor: Patrick Greiffenstein, MD, Department of Surgery UMC, Section of Trauma/Critical Care Surgery

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS
 
Jul 26th, 9:00 AM Jul 26th, 12:00 PM

Evaluation of the Efficacy of Various types of Tourniquets Utilizing an Exsanguinating Limb Simulator Model

LSU Health Medical Education Building

Tourniquets are devices that encircle a wounded limb or tissue and prevent the blood flow by tightening around major arteries and veins. Tourniquets have been in use for centuries and have proven effective at hemorrhage control in numerous settings, from battlefields to modern intraoperative applications. There are many different producers of commercially-available tourniquets such as the Military Emergency Tourniquet (MET), Combat Application Tourniquet (CAT), Israeli Silicon Tourniquet (IST), SWAT Tourniquet, Special Operations Forces Tourniquet (SOF-T), SOF-T Wide and Mechanical Advantage Tourniquet (MAT), all of which take slightly different design approaches to achieve effective circumferential compression of a limb to achieve cessation of distal blood flow. Despite the widespread use of tourniquets, new national efforts to educate the lay public in their use are relatively new. Recent studies have shown that tourniquets work differently. Recently, there has been a “Stop the Bleed Campaign” that has promoted awareness and provides a training opportunity to learn the proper usage of this technique. However, testing the effective usage of different tourniquets in the lay population has not yet been conducted. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of two types of tourniquets including the CAT (older and the newer version) and IST tourniquet on an exsanguinating limb simulator (ELS) to determine which one is most effective. An ELS was constructed from commercially available materials to simulate a human limb. Physicians and nurses were timed and data were collected on (1) time it takes to tighten the tourniquet until cessation of flow, (2) speed of application of tourniquets, and (3) subjective ease of use. Due to the novelty of our study, results are pending and will be presented at a later date. It is a process that we started fairly recent and data is still being collected. Our research team plans to use not only this model but to incorporate patients and lay people into the study by teaching them how to use tourniquets in emergencies. We plan to compare patients’ ability to apply tourniquets to those of physicians and nurses. Eventually, we will compare the efficacy of the tourniquets on the ELS model against the tourniquets on actual people to determine efficiency of the model.