Valley Hospital giving Stop the Bleed kits to CV classrooms

Every classroom in the Central Valley School District, all 964 of them, are receiving Stop the Bleed kits this week thanks to a partnership with MultiCare Valley Hospital.

Distribution of the kits started Tuesday at Ridgeline High School in Liberty Lake. Each kit contains gauze rolls, elastic wraps, trauma shears, gloves and other equipment.

The kits are a natural extension of the continuing collaboration between the hospital and the school district, said MultiCare spokesman Kevin Maloney. The hospital often does school supply drives for students and provides first aid training for teachers and staff members in the district.

“Valley Hospital has a longstanding partnership with the Central Valley School District,” Maloney said. “They’re in Valley Hospital’s backyard.”

Registered nurse Deborah Walker, the trauma program coordinator for Valley Hospital, said minutes can count when someone is bleeding heavily. The kits offer a way for people to help treat injuries until first responders can arrive. “They could save a life, literally,” she said of the kits. “Bleeding is the most preventable cause of death after an injury.”

Depending on the severity of the injury, a person can bleed to death in five minutes, Walker said. The kits are designed to prevent that. Each kit includes instructions on how to apply pressure to a wound and how to apply a tourniquet.

Walker said MultiCare, in partnership with the Spokane Valley Fire Department, has offered a variety of training classes to the district, including Stop the Bleed training. She said she reached out to Ridgeline High School earlier this year about scheduling a training session because she knew it was a new school and wanted to make sure that staff members there had Stop the Bleed training.

Several school nurses and school resource officers were among those attending the training session, including Brian Asmus, the district’s director of school safety and security. Asmus said during the training that he was interested in getting Stop the Bleed kits for the district and the idea grew from there, Walker said.

Each hospital in Washington receives grant money annually from the Washington State Department of Health that can be spent on a variety of training and programs, Walker said. Valley Hospital used $20,000 of that grant money to purchase the supplies for the kits, she said.

She said she hopes Central Valley will only be the first district to receive the kits and the program can be extended to the East Valley and West Valley districts as well.

District spokeswoman Marla Nunberg said the district is grateful to receive the kits, but hopes they will never be used. “You never know in today’s society when those kinds of things will be needed,” she said.