Rob Pincus

Compact First Aid Kit

Rob Pincus
Duration:   5  mins

Description

What should you put in a tactical first aid kit? More specifically, what should you put in a large tactical first aid kit that you keep in your vehicle, and what should you put in a compact first aid kit to carry with you? Fortunately manufacturers of medical gear give us options for every size kit.

Carry Compromises

Emergency medical professionals may carry a large kit or a mobile hospital backpack. But most of us who consider carrying life-saving medical gear important choose something more compact.

Among his self-defense accessories, Rob Pincus has a number of med kits. The largest, his trauma response kit, is staged in his vehicle when he’s driving around the country. The next largest kit he keeps in his luggage when traveling. It still carries a lot of gear. Much smaller is the emergency bag, which contains the bare minimum of items he wants to have while on the range to deal with a gunshot wound: a pressure dressing, hemostatic agent inside some gauze, tourniquet, and chest seals.

Everyday Carry Med Kits

But even this size tactical first aid kit is too large to carry every day. A great choice designed for everyday carry is the SF Responder, an ankle medical kit that contains the same items as the emergency bag, but all packaged very compactly.

Carry of a tactical first aid kit is a compromise. The amount of medical gear you can realistically carry with you daily is a lot less than what Rob keeps in his large trauma response kit, which lets him treat more people and tend to a wider variety of injuries. With the compact first aid kit, Rob can only control bleeding and help with breathing.

You can find hundreds more self-defense videos here at PDN, including numerous videos about specific med kit items.

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6 Responses to “Compact First Aid Kit”

  1. Shane's Email

    Rob, precisely what brand is that “Ratch Tourniquet”?

  2. Chris

    Great info on what gear is available to have. However people need to know how to use it. Especially a tourniquet and the sucking chest would bandage. I think it would be wise to say that people who choose to buy these kits should seek out the proper training to use them.

  3. Cary Kozberg

    extremely helpful! been carrying an ankle kit for about a year but with items that seemed oversized. This video gave suggestions on items that are better fits. Agree that links to H and H and North American Rescue would be helpful.

  4. Ernie

    A SWAT Tourniquet would fit well in your ankle unit. I have a CAT in my large Go bag and a SWAT in my over the shoulder Active Shooter Bag.

  5. John

    Thanks for this video. As a retired nurse I am familiar with all sorts and sizes of bandages, but not so much so with first aid kits. I really got a lot out of this that will help me put together a variety of tactical first aid kits.

  6. Howard

    Great info even for those of us who have been carrying 1st and 2nd aid equipment for decades. Always something new to learn. Would like to see links to North American Rescue and H&H as I don't know those companies. A bit of critique from my teacher side . . . it always feels condescending to me when a teacher uses the word "obviously". If the info were obvious to me, I wouldn't be watching the video. Otherwise, great video although I'd slow the voice down a bit. We'll wait!

I want to talk to you for a second about compact emergency medical equipment. Now, if you carry a big kit like this over your shoulder all the time, or even one of the big mobile hospital backpacks that I've seen a lot of professional medics carry, great for you. But most of us that realize that carrying medical equipment is important are gonna look for something a little bit more compact. Now this is actually the emergency kit, the trauma response kit, that I keep inside of my vehicle when I'm driving around the country when I'm out on the range. This is a kit that I keep in my bag when I travel and obviously it's a little bit smaller but it still carries a lot of gear and this also will have some daily use stuff like, you know, whatever aspirins, things like that.

This is the emergency bag that I'll usually have with me out on the range. Now, this has the bare minimum of things that I want to have out on the range to deal with a gunshot wound and that's gonna be my pressure dressing, it's gonna be a hemostatic agent inside of some gauze, it's gonna be a tourniquet and it's gonna be chest seals. So, that's about the smallest kit that I would have out in the public space but even this is too big for me to carry around every day. I'm just not gonna do it. I'm not gonna think that my wife's gonna carry this around in her purse.

We're not gonna keep something even this large in the diaper bag that we carry around with the baby. This is a kit that I actually do carry around with me most of the time now. I wear it around my ankle. This is the SF Responder, this is a ankle medical kit, and it has exactly the same things. In fact, not only do I have the pressure dressing but I also have an extra package here of absorbent material, I've got a hemostatic agent on a bandage, I've got chest seals, and, of course, I've got my tourniquet in here as well.

So, this is a very compact kit but it requires cutting back a little bit on the medical gear that I would carry. Obviously, if I had this kit with me I'm gonna be able to respond to a lot more. I'm gonna be able to do a lot more with this kit, take care of a lot more people, and cover a wider variety of emergency medicine. With this kit, I'm really dealing with only the most emergent situations for blood loss and controlling the breathing with those chest seals. A lot of people understand that carrying around this medical equipment, whether it's in a cargo pocket, in an ankle kit like this, or for the law enforcement guys even in a small pouch like this, becomes very important.

So having smaller medical gear and making sure that you're aware that smaller medical gear is an option, I think is really important to talk about. So let's take a look, for example, this dressing material, this compressed gauze. This is a package of H&H. Now this is all the same exact thing. This is 4.5 inches x 4.1 yards, so 4.5 inches wide, 4.1 yards of length.

This package from H&H, this package from North American Rescue, and then this Z-PAK dressing. They all contain exactly the same amount of material for your packing of a wound or your dressing of a wound but obviously these packages are very different sizes. This one's a little bit thicker, obviously this one's much wider and bigger, it takes up more space in a different dimension, and this one is very compact. And this one from North American Rescue is the one that I'm using in my ankle kit. I could have either one of these in different places.

If I were carrying in a cargo pocket, I might prefer this flat package but again, three different sized packages all for exactly the same material. This mini compression bandage is one that I'll compare for example, with, let me open up this kit and show you a bandage that I really like. I think it's a great bandage and you can see this one's been carried around quite a bit and been kind of crammed into different kits and pockets. It would definitely fit in a kit this size or a kit this size but this six-inch OAS fits in this kit very well. This would never fit in a pocket.

It would never fit in my ankle kit and this four-inch mini compression bandage from H&H is a great one for the ankle kit or again, for the cargo pocket, or the smaller kit. Even when it comes to the hemostatic agents, we see a lot of different options, right? I can go for this QuikClot here, which is the granular mesh bag. This one is a vacuum-packed version of a QuikClot sponge that we can use, or this bandage. This bandage obviously is incredibly flat and thin and is very easy to fold up and stick in there, and it also gives you that clotting agent effect to promote the stopping of blood flow from any wound.

So, a lot of different options when it comes to carrying your compression bandage, when it comes to carrying your gauze, your dressing, your packing, your hemostatic agent, and even tourniquets. You know, if you look over here, we've got a situation where the flat-pack from PHLster is a great way to carry a tourniquet, very flat and very easy to put on a duty belt, in a pocket, on a bag. In fact, I've got this one mounted in the car. I've got one of these mounted in the car also, you know, or if we go into this pouch, we're gonna see that I've got yet another type of trauma dressing, all right? And this particular one, again, from North American Rescue.

This is a four-inch flat-pack dressing. And again, it's vacuum-packed to be compact and I've got a RATS tourniquet. RATS tourniquets are very convenient, very easy to carry, very easy to just, you know, stick in that cargo pocket, stick in a small pouch, very easy to carry. You can put these on the flat-pack tourniquet carrier also. Even when it comes to medical equipment like safety cutters or these shears, we can get a hook-type safety cutter that are made even smaller than this and obviously much flatter than this scissors-type shears for safety cutting that you can carry around in an emergency kit.

They even have one about half this size that a lot of people are carrying around in their pocket or ankle medical kits. When it comes to medical equipment, we know it's important to carry, it's important to have with you. It's much better to have a little less capability on your person when you're moving around and when you need it than to have all the capability in the world in your car or back at home. Compact medical emergency equipment is something you should look into if you take your defense and taking care of the safety of those around you very seriously.

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