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Members of ���ż��ٲ�’s (���ż��ٲ�) College Incident Management Team (CIMT) along with College Police recently attended life-saving training. On Oct. 4, Avondale Fire & Medical personnel came to the campus to administer “Stop the Bleed” training.

According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Stop the Bleed is a national awareness campaign and call to action intended to cultivate grassroots efforts that encourage bystanders to become trained, equipped, and empowered to help in a bleeding emergency before professional help arrives.

“No matter how rapid the arrival of professional emergency responders, bystanders will always be first on the scene,” DHS notes. “A person who is bleeding can die from blood loss within five minutes, therefore it is important to quickly stop the blood loss. Those nearest to someone with life-threatening injuries are best positioned to provide first care.”

The Oct. 4 training at ���ż��ٲ� included how to identify life-threatening bleeding, how to pack a wound, how to apply pressure, and how to use a few different types of tourniquets, said Chad Galligan, Associate Vice President, Technology Services, and member of ���ż��ٲ�’s CIMT.

“It was good,” he said. “It gave important information on why it is critical to stop life-threatening bleeding and gave hands-on experience using the tools.”

Galligan said he’s confident he could stop someone from bleeding now that he’s undergone the training, which lasted about two hours.

Galligan, along with Dr. [a]Heather Weber, Vice President of Administrative Services, Joe Delgado, ���ż��ٲ� College Police Commander, Randy Naughton, Facilities Director, and Trineka Greer, Marketing Manager/Public Information Officer, make up ���ż��ٲ�’s CIMT, which was formed more than five years ago.

“Everyone was chosen for a reason,” Delgado said. “The purpose of the CIMT is to be activated in the moment of a crisis, such as an active shooter situation. Every person on the team has a role to play. Naughton, for example, knows where every water and gas line shutoff is. Galligan is responsible for the IT department. Greer is ���ż��ٲ�’s public information officer so she would be relaying information to the media and putting updates out over social media.”

The CIMT meets quarterly and undergoes routine training from attending conferences to participating in live action active shooter and chemical spill trainings right here on campus. It was after a two-day conference — the 2018 National Seminar and Tabletop Exercise Series for Institutions of Higher Education (NTTX) at the University of Texas at San Antonio — that a CIMT member[b] asked Delgado to bring Stop the Bleed training to ���ż��ٲ�.

“Stop the Bleed was one of the vendors at that conference,” he said. “They suggested we contact our local fire department to ask for training and Avondale Fire & Medical was gracious enough to host it for us.”

Another Stop the Bleed training session is planned in November for members of the College Police force and CIMT who couldn’t make it Oct. 4.

“We are a very proactive campus,” Delgado said. “We are out there community policing. I don’t want people on campus to only see us when there’s a problem. I want everyone to see us and be comfortable seeing us. We have very little crime here on campus and I like to attribute that to us being out there.”