Prepare for risks, act safely but also be prepared for the worst

There is a surprising parallel between a battle that the farming community faces and one in many of our city and town centres; preventable deaths from bleed injuries.

Provisional figures released by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) for April 2023 to March 2024 showed 32 people lost their lives following accidents on farms in Great Britain. In January this year, the Office for National Statistics revealed that knife crime has surged by 5 per cent in the year ending September 2023 and the Metropolitan Police dealt with 67 knife-related homicides during 2023.

The NFU was urging all farmers to prioritise safety this spring and the Farm Safety Foundation’s Farm Safety Week – running 22 to 26 July 2024 – provides another opportunity to bring safety messages to the fore. In urban areas, police forces, charities and schools are working together to tackle knife crime and educate to prevent incidents – albeit very different incidents – in a similarly passionate way.

While preventative education and action is crucial, organisations that are dealing with the tragic outcomes of knife crime recognise that the goal to focus on is saving lives. Treating a person’s injury swiftly is one part of the solution.

This is thanks to the vision and tenacious passion of a grieving mother, Dr. Lynne Baird, who lost her son Daniel when he was stabbed in Birmingham city centre in 2017. Not only did she create The Daniel Baird Foundation to bring awareness and education to the danger of catastrophic bleeding, but she also worked with the West Midlands Ambulance Service (WMAS) to create the #controlthebleed campaign and UK’s first bleed control kit. We’ve worked with Lynne for many years and are proud to produce these original kits that contains all the necessary items to control different types of bleed injury until emergency responders arrive.

A person suffering a severe injury can bleed out and die in as little as three minutes but an equal concern to those in remote and rural areas is the time it takes for an ambulance to arrive; a seemingly minor bleed injury can become a concern very quickly and reports that patients are being asked to make their own way to a hospital seem to be increasing. While any first aid or equipment training is always beneficial, The Daniel Baird Foundation bleed control kit was designed by WMAS to be easily used by anyone seeing it for the first time. The body map visually explains how to treat different injuries with the items included – seal it, pack it or wrap it – and with some 20,000 kits across the UK, they are being used and saving lives every week.

What started as an answer to saving more lives of stab victims in city centres, has now evolved to become a go to emergency medical kit for a variety of serious bleed injuries across multiple sectors.

Construction and industrial firms are now placing kits in vehicles and easy to access places in premises as well as installing cabinets that house the kits on buildings and site hoardings to also benefit the community; if accessible to the public, the kit can be registered and any 999 callers could be directed to the medical equipment in a similar way to how people can be instructed to retrieve public defibrillators. Many public defib cabinets now contain a bleed control kit too and remote and rural places that don’t have an electricity supply can install a wind and solar powered defib unit.

The ’what if?’ scenario seems to far too great to ignore for farmers. Farming accounts for 1 per cent of the working population but an alarming 16% of all workplace deaths (HSE Fatal Injuries in Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing Report in GB 2022/2023). If other historically hazard-filled sectors like construction are preparing for risk and acting safely, but then also readying themselves for the event of an incident, then farming is surely the next to embrace such ambulance-level medical equipment.