COVINGTON, Ky. - In 11 years as a paramedic, Danielle Stiner has seen a lot of blood.

 

But regardless of whether the wound was caused by a bullet, knife, chain saw, a tree that fell the “wrong” way, a motorcycle accident, or even a head-first fall into a mirror - the same commandment applied:

 

 

That message - stop the bleeding, ASAP - is the core element of a joint program between the Covington Fire Department and St. Elizabeth Healthcare that trains bystanders to save lives.

 

Through the program, Stiner - the EMS community outreach coordinator for St. Elizabeth - has trained over 600 people from over 40 organizations, including schools, businesses, and non-profit organizations in Covington.

 

Tuesday night, coinciding with the first-ever Stop the Bleed Month, the Covington City Commission passed a resolution honoring Stiner for her dedication to the program and passion for spreading its precepts.

 

“It can take just minutes for professional emergency responders to get to a scene, but those minutes count when someone has a wound that is bleeding badly,” said Covington Fire Department Captain Greg Salmons, whose duties include coordinating outreach to schools. “Bystanders will almost always be the first to get to a victim, and they should know what to do.”

 

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security adopted the “Stop the Bleed” program in June 2017 as a proactive measure to address the traumatic loss of life during school shootings, and a month later Covington formed a partnership with St. Elizabeth.

 

Stiner said the program started slow but she is now offering the one-hour class three times a month to various groups, including teachers, office staff and maintenance staff at Covington’s schools, employees and students at Gateway Community and Technical College, and hospital volunteers.

 

The training focuses on teaching the public how to gauge the severity of the bleeding, recognize when how and when to act, and use tools like direct pressure, wound packing, and a tourniquet to stop the flow, she said. “There’s bleeding, and then there’s major bleeding,” she said.

 

“Our goal is to empower bystanders by not only giving them the knowledge but also the confidence so that they both know what to do in an emergency and are willing to spring into action,” Stiner said.

 

She said she hasn’t heard back from anybody who has had to use that training yet, “but I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, when you think of why they would need to use it.”

 

But merely knowing that there are that many more people in Covington’s schools and other agencies who could save a life in an emergency is a powerful thing, City officials said.

 

  

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