The leading cause of preventable death in trauma patients is exsanguination, or bleeding to death. Ninety nine percent of rescue services in the United States do not stock ambulances or helicopters with blood for life-saving transfusions. Desoto parish is paving the way for carrying blood products on emergency medical services (EMS) vehicles that can save more American lives than any other initiative in our lifetime.
Earlier this month, Desoto EMS became the second ground agency in the state to carry blood products. The typical conditions that would require a transfusion are patients with a traumatic injury, or GI bleeds, post-partum hemorrhage, or a clotting disorder.
Gordon Miller is the paramedic supervisor with Desoto EMS, and he says “there is no substitute for patients in need of a blood transfusion. Prior to this. And a large majority of EMS agencies carry what’s called crystalloids. It has no capability of carrying oxygen nor clotting capabilities in actually, it can be detrimental to patients in hemorrhagic shock, especially due to trauma.”
Currently, only 152 EMS agencies in 23 states have the capability of carrying blood products. The primary setback is funding. Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance don’t cover blood transfusion services until a patient is in a hospital, and EMS services are usually unable to bear to cost without losing other services.
But for a rural state like Louisiana, many patients only have minutes for this life-saving intervention. Miller says, “In north Louisiana, we have a LSU being a trauma center and there’s trauma center in Alexandria. So there’s big spots where there’s transport times, maybe 50 minutes to an hour and a half.”
In Miller’s first experience with transfusion blood products, he was on a helicopter, and he says he saw a patient come back to life before his eyes, saying, “people say a lot of times that when they have near-death experiences where they see the light on our side of it, we kind of see that light fading out. That patient was going to the grave and we started administering blood products to them and they literally come back to us and we were able to get him to the hospital alive.”
Desoto EMS has a partnership with LifeShare Blood Center, and Miller says, “Donors are the true heroes.” Blood donated yesterday could be out in the field tomorrow, saving a life.
The Prehospital Blood Transfusion Initiative Coalition spearheaded by Dr. John Holcomb, a ex-military trauma surgeon and current trauma surgeon with University of Alabama, and with the help of a steering committee is building a multi-disciplinary, industry-wide collaborative initiative to advance and promote prehospital blood transfusion programs.
