This course is designed to teach law enforcement officers the time critical skills needed to manage life threatening bleeding as well as airway management in situations that are unsafe for civilian EMS, while providing efficient and effective life saving skills to assist fellow officers.
If you’ve ever been shot or stabbed, you had better know how to control the bleeding. Lose too much blood and you will be dead in a few short minutes. You don’t have time to wait on EMS – you have to care for yourself. That’s where training comes in.
Surviving a gunfight may come down to how quickly you can properly apply a tourniquet to a wounded limb and get back in the fight. Yes, neutralizing the threat is a component of your survival, but if you’ve taken rounds your fight for life may have just started.
The United States military developed a system for trauma care in the field called TCCC: Tactical Combat Casualty Care. The system has a lot going for it, including the fact that it is based on what you can do to help yourself in the most common, survivable injuries experienced in combat. While most officers are not encountering IEDs every day, we do experience some of the same injuries that TCCC is designed for.
Here at the Miami-Dade Public Safety Training Institute, we are amongst the nation’s law enforcement pioneers offering a 40 -hour course titled Tactical Life Saver (TLS). The course uses lecture, live-fire and force-on-force exercises to teach the basic skills you need in the field to stop your attacker and keep yourself alive until EMS can evac you to a trauma center.