First aid courses could be updated to teach the public to deal with the types of injury caused by terrorist attacks.
Experts said that there was a danger of victims with stab, gunshot or bomb wounds bleeding to death before medical help could arrive if people simply followed normal first-aiding protocols.
A team of military and civilian doctors at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham have created an app called citizenAID that people can keep on their phones, offering advice on what to do and how best to help if there is an active gunman or knife attacker, or a suspected or exploded bomb.
Colonel Peter Mahoney, co-author of citizenAID, said: “It is a distillation of our hard-won experience, particularly from Iraq and Afghanistan, where we were dealing with combat-related injuries.” They realised that traditional first aid, which teaches people to first secure the airway and check someone is breathing before looking at circulation, was no help to those injured by blasts who were suffering great blood loss.
“You are in danger of someone bleeding to death if you follow normal ‘airway, breathing, circulation’,” Colonel Mahoney said.
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Instead, the app tells people to first deal with catastrophic bleeding, using things like belts, scarves and ties as well as pencils, forks and twigs for tourniquets, before following the usual protocols in the “inevitable” gap before emergency services arrived.
Colonel Mahoney stressed that current first aid courses were “absolutely appropriate” for most injuries and illnesses that people would have to cope with, and that the app dealt with “the extreme end”.