Doctor and Webster Co. Sheriff’s Department provide trauma kits, crisis response training for local schools

MABEN, Miss. (WCBI) – Dr. Craig Moffett of the Maben Medical Clinic and the Webster County Sheriff’s Department delivered trauma medical kits to East Webster High School and East Webster Elementary School on February 21.

The kits included a tourniquet, compression bandages, medical gloves and gauze and are intended to help keep someone from bleeding to death.

“This small, inexpensive kit will save a child’s life,” says Chief Deputy J.C. Smith.

Dr. Moffett says it could take four minutes or less for someone to die from major bleeding.

“We have some amazing first responders, but if there’s only two or three of them in the county, I mean, we’ve got counties where it takes 30 minutes to get from one side to the other,” he says.

However, the doctor says blood loss is the most preventable cause of death in a trauma situation. Which is why he joined forces with the Webster County Sheriff’s Department to equip local schools to respond to a crisis.

“So many times in education, people tell us what to do, but they don’t supply us with the resources,” says East Webster Elementary School principal Jennifer Carver. “So this was huge for them to go, ‘Hey, this is what you do and here is what you do it with.”

Dr. Moffett and the sheriff’s department also trained the schools’ staff on how to use everything included in the medical kits.

“The deputies and I actually physically had all the teachers apply tourniquets to themselves and to someone else,” Dr. Moffett says. “We had them pack pretend wounds.”

A tourniquet should be applied just above the wound and tightened until the bleeding stops.

“Once the bleeding is no longer occurring, you would lock (the tourniquet) down, put the time stamp over and put down the time you applied the tourniquet,” Dr. Moffett says. “Which is very important for the doctors at the ER.”

The training was also just as much about how to react in the event of a school shooting, natural disaster, or other emergencies.

“I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, I don’t even know if I can do it like, this is my baby, this is my child,'” Carver says.

“Compartmentalize it, find your issue, know what your solution is, execute your solution,” says Calvin Lim, one of the instructors with the sheriff’s department.

They gave them enough kits for the 130 classrooms across the two schools, which adds up to nearly one thousand students.

“I would love this to go statewide, I’d love for it to go nationwide,” says Chief Deputy Smith. “I think that this is a program that, as I said earlier, will absolutely save a life somewhere, sometime and the bigger that it gets, the more likely it is to save multiple lives.”

The sheriff’s department raised about $2,000 in donations to create the trauma kits. They say they plan to continue working with the schools to provide other emergency resources and training throughout the school year.