Parkland was 5 years ago. How we respond to shootings respond can save lives | Opinion

The events of February 14, 2018 left 17 dead and 17 wounded.

The day after the horrific school shooting in Parkland, Florida, a TV news anchor interviewed 12 surviving students. What one shared was heartbreaking: "Kids were bleeding out everywhere. We didn't know what to do with them."

That interview has haunted me since. As a parent, how would I have felt knowing that, if aid could have been rendered sooner, maybe, just maybe, my child would have survived?

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And now will the parents of the Michigan State University students who lost their lives this past Monday be asking themselves the same heartbreaking question?

In 2019, The American College of Surgeons published a study that found nearly 1 in 5 shooting victims died of what were essentially survivable wounds. These victims would have lived, had they been transported to the hospital and given medical care sooner.      

© J. Scott Applewhite, AP School students from Montgomery County, Md., in suburban Washington, rally in solidarity with those affected by the shooting at Parkland High School in Florida, at the Capitol in Washington, in this photo from Feb. 21, 2018.

Recent data tells us that best practices in school safety aren't getting the desired results. After all, best practices are only best practices until we discover better practices. Imagine that in every school shooting suffered over the last several decades, between 15% and 20% of the children and staff killed could have survived if they had only received medical treatment more rapidly.

The Survival+ Program was born from the recognition of this very issue. We recruited a team of experienced leaders in Public Safety and asked one question: How do we fix this and prevent more lives from being needlessly lost?

How do we make that happen?

One of our advisors, Police Chief Keith Germain of Barnegat, New Jersey, noticed a vital discrepancy in response practices by asking one key question: What happens when a fellow officer has been wounded?

The answer is simple: Police administer immediate aid to their fellow wounded officers, get them into a squad car and take them to the nearest hospital without delay. The injured officer is not left on the ground waiting for an EMS response. 

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If this is what officers do for one another and would do for their family members, then why shouldn't it be the standard practice for everyone's children or loved ones? The simple answer: because that wasn’t the accepted best practice. But now that we know that current practices aren’t working, it is our obligation to do better for our children and our schools.

In two simple steps, we can ensure that both the training and equipment are in place to deliver immediate point-of-wounding care and provide for the rapid evacuation of victims to definitive medical treatment:

Step 1: Immediate treatment

The American College of Surgeons study showed that most survivable wounds sustained by shooting victims were non-hemorrhaging chest injuries, often called sucking wounds. That means that while there's value in providing tourniquets, in-school bleeding control programs must include valved chest seals and compression bandages which have a much greater potential for buying time to save lives.

There were 34 casualties at Parkland. It is unrealistic to expect enough EMS support from our many supporting towns for a mass shooting event when the bleed-out time for a child is under 5 minutes.

To further increase the chances of success, we need the people closest to the victims to be trained to administer immediate point-of-wounding care. This means teachers, staff, and, where appropriate, the students themselves need to be trained and prepared to administer aid.

We need to move towards a day when we never have to hear again that no one knew how to help our children and school staff.

Step 2: Getting them out

While the immediate point-of-wounding care adds time to the survivability clock, the area where we lose the most victims is delays associated with transport to hospitals. This results in what is sometimes referred to as "stage and wait" deaths.

The Survival+ Program changes the paradigm by ensuring that once an adequate number of contact officers/teams deal with the active threat, additional arriving and available officers immediately treat the bleeding and evacuate victims to casualty collection points. If EMS resources are available and have arrived on-scene, they can now treat and transport long before the scene is declared a "warm zone." Treatment and evacuation can begin much sooner.

In the absence of timely, on-scene EMS resources, police chiefs can authorize their officers to transport victims directly via police vehicles to hospitals. That's the protocol they would follow for a fellow officer who'd been hurt — and the same response we'd want for our own children if they were seriously wounded when time is of the essence.

This two-step system, providing immediate point-of-wounding care, combined with rapid and timely evacuation to definitive medical care, will, for the first time, create an active shooter response that gives every victim with survivable wounds the greatest chance at survival.

The Pascack Valley Regional High School District is a recognized leader in school safety, receiving an award from the New Jersey Department of Education for preparedness and dissemination of bleeding control kits to all staff.

We look forward to our continued work with the Pascack Valley Regional High School District Administrators and the police chiefs of Hillsdale, River Vale, Montvale, and Woodcliff Lake, with support from surrounding Pascack Valley police departments. This new methodology will help ensure their students and school staff have access to the most current security protocols and procedures. 

The New Jersey Association of School Resource Officers has helped develop this program. In addition, the Bergen County EMS Training Center agreed to provide the training.

We are forever indebted to the Pascack Valley Regional High School District and the Pascack Valley area Police Departments for their determination to continue to protect the lives of their students and staff.

We hope more New Jersey towns will implement the Survival+ Program methodology to set new standards for best practices in school safety.

Please contact us if you are interested in implementing the Survival+ Program in your schools.

Stewart Krentzman is the founder of the Survival+ program, To learn more, visit https://survival-plus.org.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Parkland was 5 years ago. How we respond to shootings respond can save lives | Opinion