Bleeding Control in the Bush: Kit for When Help Is Hours Away

This is an equipment guide, not medical training. None of this kit helps if nobody has taught you to use it. Get nationally accredited first aid or remote-area first aid training before you rely on any of it.

The gap

A chainsaw kicks back into your thigh. You're forty minutes up a fire trail and the ambulance is a long way behind that. A femoral bleed doesn't wait for either number.

Remote work and town work differ in one way that matters: time. In town you're minutes from an emergency department. On a cutting block, up a ridge or out on the water, you're hours from one, and severe bleeding runs on a much shorter clock. The first aid kit in your ute does nothing for you when the ute is a kilometre downhill.

The injuries that matter

A chainsaw moves fast enough that the wound is open before your hand leaves the throttle. Chaps cover the front of your legs. They don't cover your forearm, your shoulder, or the bloke holding the other end of the log.

Hunting adds firearms and field-dressing knives, both at close range, often with one other person present and no signal. Boat work adds crush injuries and propellers.

These injuries bleed hard, and most of them bleed from limbs. That last part is the good news, because limb bleeding is the kind you can stop with your hands and a tourniquet.

The kit

Four items do most of the work.

• Tourniquet. The single most important item you can carry for severe limb bleeding. One is a start. Two is better, because a bad femoral bleed can take both.
• Pressure dressing and compressed gauze. For the wounds a tourniquet cannot reach: shoulder, groin, torso. You pack the wound and you lean on it.
• Chest seals. For penetrating chest wounds. A twin pack covers entry and exit.
• Shears and gloves. You cannot treat what you cannot see, and denim over a bleeding thigh hides it.

Keep this kit for bleeding. Blisters and splinters belong in a different bag.

Where it lives

On you. A kit in the pack is a kit you take off when you start working, and you get hurt while you're working. A kit in the vehicle is a kit somebody has to run to.

Belt-mounted works for most people out here. The Micro IFAK 2.0 sits low enough on a belt that you forget it's there, which is the only reason anyone carries one every day. Put the tourniquet in its own pouch, mounted where either hand reaches it without opening anything. You might be working with one hand, and it might not be your good one.

Why gear built for soldiers suits the bush

We built this range for soldiers and police, and the requirements turn out to be the same ones you have. Laser-cut MOLLE keeps the profile slim and sheds water instead of holding it, which matters more in wet country than it ever did on a range. Elastic retention beats velcro for speed. The pouch opens flat, so you're not digging with two fingers in gloves while someone bleeds.

We make the medical range in Ranger Green and Coyote Tan alongside Black and Multicam. Those two colours were drawn up for soldiers. They suit a cutting block and a hunting pack just as well.

Where to start

The IFAK and tourniquet pouch combo gives you both pouches, empty, to fill to your own training. If you'd rather have a working kit from day one, the General Operational Fitout arrives loaded. Both run in Ranger Green and Coyote Tan, and the full medical range has the rest.

Then book the training. A remote-area first aid course runs a couple of days, and without it the kit is luggage.