FIGHTING CHANCE

Temple University Hospital’s Trauma and Emergency Medicine Departments have developed a successful community outreach program that educates residents in trauma-related bystander aid and is currently training a local cadre to facilitate community-driven instruction. Borrowing from combat medicine’s best practice guidelines, and with input from community stakeholders and leaders from the Philadelphia Police Department, TUH created Fighting Chance. Through Fighting Chance, TUH physicians and nurses provide lifesaving skills training to communities suffering some of the highest rates of penetrating injury in the state.

To date, the Fighting Chance program has taught thousands of residents living in violence plagued neighborhoods how to provide first aid to their friends, neighbors, and family members.

Fighting Chance trainings are free of charge and are facilitated by Temple University Hospital volunteers in the very communities where they are requested. During the 2-hour training, facilitators use video, audio, lecture and hands-on instruction to educate citizens in the fundamentals of bystander aid. By the end of the training, participants will be versed in the basics of hemorrhage control, as well as such things as:

• Personal safety

• Proximal pressure points

• Tourniquets

• Pressure dressings

• Positional airway management

• Material utilization, and

• Scene control

Everyone who completes the training will receive a certificate of participation.