Milwaukee County ambulances are adding blood supplies. It could help keep trauma patients alive

First responders at several Milwaukee County fire departments will begin carrying units of blood to keep severely injured trauma patients from bleeding out and dying before they reach a hospital.

It's a practice fire departments elsewhere have started to adopt, amid growing evidence that administering blood to trauma patients on the way to hospitals could save many thousands of lives a year if implemented by first responders across the United States.

"This is a program that will be tangible. We will see the results ... and there's no doubt that it will save lives," said Dr. Ben Weston, chief medical director for the Milwaukee County Office of Emergency Management.

Until now, gunshot victims, crash victims or other trauma patients in Milwaukee County would wait until arriving at a hospital to receive a blood transfusion to replace lost blood, a county press release said. Severely injured patients risked bleeding out in the time it took to get to a hospital.

Typically, paramedics administered saline to severely injured trauma patients to help stabilize their blood pressure while on the way to the hospital, Weston said.

"The problem with that is it dilutes the blood, and it doesn't allow blood to do its essential task, which is delivering oxygen" to the brain and the rest of the body, said Weston, also the chief health policy advisor for the county.

The Milwaukee Fire Department will begin carrying blood on two of its ambulances sometime in January after its paramedics receive training, Weston said. The South Milwaukee Fire Department is slated to start soon, too.

Meanwhile, the Greendale, North Shore and Wauwatosa fire departments have started carrying blood on ambulances, Weston said.

Very few of the country's emergency medical systems carry blood on ambulances.

Last year, an investigation by The Dallas Morning News and the San Antonio Express-News found that nationwide tens of thousands of trauma patients a year were needlessly dying before reaching hospitals.

It found that if paramedics widely carried blood, as military medics have done for years, those lives could be spared.

Milwaukee County's EMS system will be the first in Wisconsin to offer whole blood transfusions in the field, Weston said.

In Milwaukee County, as many as 350 patients a year could benefit from blood transfusions before reaching a hospital, said Dan Pojar, director of the county Office of Emergency Management's EMS division.

But Pojar does not expect medics will administer blood to anywhere near that number of patients in the first year. That's because not every ambulance will have blood on board, he said.

Pojar hopes medics will administer blood to at least 50 patients in the first year of the initiative.

He does not expect the county will outfit every ambulance with blood because of logistical challenges maintaining the blood at safe temperatures and ensuring the blood gets used before expiring.

To start, a total of six response vehicles across the five fire departments will carry blood, Weston said. The goal is eventually to implement the initiative across all the county's municipal fire departments.

Each ambulance will carry two units of whole blood, or blood that hasn't been broken down into components like plasma, Weston said. The blood will be stored in coolers outfitted with monitors that try to ensure temperatures stay within the proper range, he said.

The blood is provided by Versiti Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Diagnostic Laboratory Blood Bank, the release says. Any blood that is not used within the projected lifespan will be returned to the Wisconsin Diagnostic Laboratory Blood Bank to be used in hospitals before expiration.

The county EMS division will provide resources, training and logistics to support the new initiative.

"This was not a small lift for our EMS departments and first responders, but, as with everything we do, this has been a team effort," Weston said.