Please recommend: auto first aid kit

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was hoping a doctor, nurse, paramedic or EMT (someone with real trauma training), could point me to a purchasable first aid kit for my daughters new car. They sell them everywhere, but I am not looking for Disney bandaids and Flintsone Vitamins, I am looking for “I driving to the hospital as fast as I can to reattach it! Take this! There will be something in it to stop everything from coming out of you.”

I’m willing to pay whatever, but I sense the real serious pain killers and such are by prescription. Still, quality bandages and all kinds of valuable life saving stuff would be worth giving her.

2

Kerlex, Corbon, athletic tape or medical tape, tourniquet, Sam splint, cravats, various sized bandages, epinephrine (if you can get it), OTC medications/pain killers & ointments. Pretty much in that order, really. Oh, and some trauma shears. Those should probably should be #4. Recommend you buy the items separately off Amazon or somewhere and then pack your own kit.

3

Not sure what you expect to find. This is a relatively inexpensive first aid kit but like most it’s heavy on bandages. It has the usual tweezers and some nice things like a cold pack, but don’t expect anything to contain a respirator or defibrillator. The kit doesn’t even contain aspirin, the kit makers may be hesitant to include any real medication for several reasons, among them that many kits will sit in the trunk of a hot car for years before ever being used.

ETA: @Bear_Nenno gives good advice on making your own kit. Many kits you can buy will be filled out with inexpensive items of limited use.

4

This is precisely the kind of thing I am looking for. I’ll start a list here of links to the Amazon listings for the things I’d purchase a la carte and perhaps you and others can critique my choices.

5

Seconding Bear_Nenno’s advice to stock your own kit. Two reasons: you’ll get closer to the sort of kit you’re thinking of (and more cheaply) and you’ll be way more familiar with it. The big thing about a first aid kit is knowing what’s in it, where it is, and how to use it. Consider getting your daughter to help pack it.

Bear_Nenno lists a number of good things. Get a small satchel or a large Tupperware box and fit into it as many gauze pads as you can (large trauma dressings, etc.) and a lot of roller gauze for packing serious wounds. Learn how to do this. Make sure your daughter knows. Mark the container with orange duct tape.

Buy a decent quality prepared tourniquet. Then stock some triangular bandages (“cravats” mentioned above) and a stick for improvising more.

Pocket mask for mouth-to-mask breathing.
Appropriately sized exam gloves to protect her from exposure.
Sterile saline for flushing an eye with caustic substance in it.
Very clean sheet folded and in a zip-lock bag for burn dressing.
Clean plastic trash bag to use as an occlusive dressing.
Seconding the trauma shears.
Small flashlight with decent batteries.

Seconding an epi auto-injector if she or anyone likely to be in the car has severe allergies.

Then, don’t forget the small stuff, the convenient things for minor emergencies: band-aids in various sizes, tweezers, cuticle scissors, OTC pain meds and, in a zip-lock snack bag, a couple sugar packets and a couple fast-food salt packets.

Then comes the IMPORTANT part: making sure she knows how to use the things. Good luck, Sitnam.

6

If you just want to grab something off the shelf, I recommend looking at REI, which has a wide selection of pre-packaged kits of many sizes. They also have a “how to put together a first aid kit” page.

7

Further thoughts: I don’t know how much trunk space your daughter will want to take up with a first aid kit. My own first aid kit is a backpack containing plastic (Tupperware-type) containers of various shapes and sizes so the supplies are modularized.

I’ve got a strip of bright orange fabric knotted to the top of it in case I ever have to send someone else to get it from my car. (“Grab the one with the orange stuff !”)

Beside first aid materials, how much other emergency stuff do you want your daughter to carry? Things like flares, a folding shovel, a tarp, a couple blankets, a fire extinguisher, a GOOD flashlight and a blinking red light. Simple tools and possibly a crow bar? A gallon of emergency water? It all depends on what-all you want her to be prepared for.

I know when my own daughters start driving, the emergency gear in their cars will weigh more than they do.

8

Another relevant possibility is a fire extinguisher.

9

Unless you work in medical and know what you’re doing, the last thing you should be doing is giving anyone some form of pain pill or other medication if they’re injured. You would have no idea what is OK to use, and could create a life threatening situation in many ways, primarily if the emergency people started meds right away w/o knowing about it.

10

Helps if you spell it right. What Nyvaak referred to as roller gauze is what I was calling Kerlex. It’s actually “Kerlix” with an “i”. Be sure to spell it right when you search. Kerlix gauze rolls.

Corbon (which is actually a producer of ammunition, not medical supplies) should have been “Coban”, a 3M product. Any self-adherent, breathable, stretchy wrap would be fine, I’m sure. Search for Coban wrap and you’ll get a bunch.

Athletic tape is not to be confused with Kinesthesia tape. You should be searching for “Zinc oxide athletic trainers’ tape”.

Medical tape is “medical / surgical tape”.

For the tourniquet, you want to get a “CAT Tourniquet” (beware cheap knock-offs).

SAM splint I spelled correctly in my previous post.

Trauma shears.

After that, you just add cravats, gauze pads of various sizes, premade dressings and trauma bandages as you desire (such as the “4 inch Israeli/Emergency Trauma Bandage”, Abdominal bandage, etc). These are all great to have, but you can make anything you need on the spot with just Kerlix, tape and cravats… cut it to size with the shears (or just use the whole roll).

11

You might also pack an antihistamine. The ones that dissolve in your mouth are good, but pills work if given soon enough. You need a prescription for an EpiPen, but an otc antihistamine can save someone’s life if they have a strong allergic reaction (think bee sting) and it takes a while to get them to the emergency room. That’s maybe more useful in a wilderness first aid kit than an auto first aid kit, but the only time I’ve ever saved a life in an emergency, it was by giving them an antihistamine.

And for the car, a couple of flares or lighted warning things might be useful if there’s a person in the road.

It’s not exactly an emergency item, but i have a very small snow shovel that i leave in the trunk through the winter, and it’s come in handy on several occasions.

12

Fordgt100, you are correct about medications. Having OTC pain meds and an antihistamine (good thought, puzzlegal!) is only for one’s own use or a conscious adult who can make an informed decision about taking a medication. Thanks for the reminder.

13

Depending on how far into this you want (her) to get, a Wilderness First Aid Course might be worthwhile.

My wife carries tools on her bicycle – not because she’s skilled at using them, but because she could have a problem and a passerby may have the knowledge but not the gear.

As a (long-ago) volunteer firefighter, I think there is some non-zero risk of doing the wrong thing, or the right thing in the wrong way, but a decent course might mitigate that.

14

Based on what has been used most out of my field/auto first aid kits, add a 5 pack of tampons. A surprising number of times, it’s been the guy (me) who is prepared. :stuck_out_tongue:

15

While a firmly agree with @Bear_Nenno about building your own kit, I would not purchase any critical medical items such as tourniquets, hemostatic gauze, pressure bandages, et cetera from Amazon. Amazon is full of counterfeit medical items and while I’ve never heard of a genuine CAT tourniquet fail in operation I’ve seen the fake ones fail just in training. The premade kits you find at REI or on Amazon are mostly useless for real traumatic injuries; if you want an actual premade trauma kit order them from North American Rescue, Dark Angel Medical, or some other specific medical supply provider which will verify their supply from legitimate manufacturers.

My truck medkit is one bag but actually has two sections inside of it; one is a trauma kit with tourniquets (two in kit plus two more in extra storage), compression bandages, a dual chest seal, small and medium compression compression bandages, heavy duty trauma shears (Leatherman Raptor with a glass-breaker), and a UV flashlight, along with several pairs of gloves for body substance isolation (BSI). The other is a “boo-boo kit” with bandages, gauze rolls, cravats, tape, OTC analgesic and anti-histamine medication, burn gel, Cavit, wound closures, antiseptic iodine, saline, sugar and electrolytes, et cetera. I also have a SAM splint, stethoscope, sphygmomanometer, penlight with pupil gauge, a couple of larger flashlights, plus a couple more chest seals and compression bandages, gloves, and eye protection to fill out the bag. I no longer carry a CPR rescue breathing mask because rescue breathing has been shown to be ineffective and wastes the rescuer’s energy, and I don’t carry sutures or an oropharyngeal airway because while I’ve been trained to use both I don’t have the certifications to use intrusive devices. This kit doubles as my expedition-grade backcountry medicine kit and so it probably has more in it than most people would consider, and my small group and solo kits eschew most of the trauma gear because if you suffer some kind of serious trauma miles away from the trailhead that requires a chest seal or CPR the odds are likely that you’re going to die before you can get evac’d, so I tend to focus on a few high value items and a bunch of quality-of-life stuff like burn gel and infection prevention over chest seals and multiple tourniquets. I don’t carry an epipen because of the cost and assume that anyone who needs it should be carrying one themselves but I always check with companions before hiking whether they need/have one or have other medical issues such as diabetes, a heart condition, et cetera, and what medications they have and want me to apply in the case that they are incapacitated.

All of that being said, none of this gear will be of much use to you without the right training. To that end, the o.p. should enroll the daughter in a Red Cross, NOLS, or WMA First Responder (not just First Aid) course, which will teach her how to both build and use her own kit. Carrying a pre-built kit with no training or time spent learning how to use the contents virtually guarantees panic when a medical emergency or even just a significant minor injury occurs, while these courses no only train to respond to a variety of medical issues but also have the students worth through scenarios where the learn to size the scene up, perform airway/breathing/circulation check, and then determine the appropriate course of action given the incident and apparent malady, i.e. check vitals, perform an exam, or take a medical history, and from there formulate a list of issues and a plan to perform interventions and/or call for medical assistance (or evac in the backcountry). Not having this training means that not only is the responder unprepared to deal with the various issues but may also not recognize a hazardous situation and run into unforeseen danger like a toxic atmosphere or an unstable overhead environment. If you have the training you can often improvise the necessary gear (another thing you’ll learn in a Wilderness First Responder course) but the best gear is all but useless without the right training. Also, the WFR/WFRR classes I’ve taken have mostly been a blast.

Stranger

16

It always makes me nervous to disagree with someone as esteemed as Stranger, but disagree I must. I would never recommend omitting the pocket mask. Three reasons for this (in ascending order of importance):

  1. Rescue breathing is still recommended in all cardiac arrest cases where the arrest is precipitated by a respiratory cause. These have a far, far smaller chance of resuscitation, but without rescue breathing they have zero chance.

  2. Witnesses of an emergency or those on scene very soon afterward may encounter a victim with a pulse but no breathing. I have ventilated any number of these. Some died anyway. Some survived. Without breathing they definitely wouldn’t have.

  3. Most of all: apart from its effectiveness, rescue breathing is going to happen, regardless. Outside of a triage situation, how many of us are going to turn our back on a non-breathing victim? Since I know I’ll do the breathing anyway, I want a mask between me and them. Over a long and rather dim-witted career I have had more than one mouthful of someone else’s vomit. Turns out the pocket mask is preferable.

17

As someone mentioned above, the best F/A kit is useless if you don’t know how to use it. A good first aid course would be the first place I’d start, before worrying about stocking the kit. I’ve take Wilderness F/A many times to lead trips in the backcountry but I’m not sure it would be be the best choice for this application.

Even with proper training and a good kit the most important thing your daughter to know is to call 911 ASAP before starting to administer any aid. But she will be potentially be able to do a lot of good with proper training and materials.

18

Feel free to disagree, and I am by no means the ultimate arbiter of fact or best practice, but consider these points:

  • Breathing exhaled air into a patient increases the carbon dioxide concentration, particularly if the the rescuer is already fatigued, which prevents adequate perfusion of oxygenated blood regardless of breathing efforts.
  • Compression of the thorax will also force stale air out of the lungs and oxygen-rich air into them upon return at a rate in excess of that provided by exhalation breathing.
  • Rescue breathing also reduces oxygenation of the the rescuer to the extent that they become more easily fatigued; in the one case that I performed team CPR on an actual patient, I actually had the person performing compressions briefly pass out due to hypoxia, presumably from a combination of rescue breathing and the exertion of doing chest compressions.
  • If you are doing CPR on your own, doing rescue breaths in addition to chest compressions will severely limit the duration that you can continue to perform CPR; performing chest compressions is extraordinarily fatiguing and doing so for more than fifteen or twenty minutes on a stretch beyond expectation.
  • Realistically, if you cannot return involuntary breathing function within the first ten minutes without supplementary oxygen, the patient will almost certainly suffer significant brain damage to the extent of not being able to be rehabilitated back to sufficient mental acuity to function independently regardless of rescue breathing efforts.

This is not to say that rescue breathing does not have application, and in particular in drowning victims which is why I do carry a mask with my SCUBA kit (although the prognosis for drowning is even worse than infarction) and as you note with respiratory but non-breathing victims, but in general rescue breathing for a cardiac victim does not improve outcomes. Where rescue breathing is performed, a mask isn’t really all that protective against respiratory pathogens as the rescuer will be breathing exhalations anyway, and primarily serves as a barrier against vomiting, which is gross but not actually very likely to transmit disease. In general, when rescue breathing is recommended it is emphasized that infection risk to the rescuer is low, and the real reason for not performing rescue breathing is that it just detracts from executing effective and consistent chest compressions which are really the primary purpose of CPR.

Stranger

19

You make some very good points, and some that I might want to argue. But would that amount of further discussion constitute a hijack in this thread? I don’t yet have a good feel for that.

20

I think it is pertinent in the context of the thread, and as noted I don’t consider my personal option to be the definitive statement on the issue. Various medical organization have different views on the merits of rescue breathing, and ultimately my view rests upon my experience with the merits of putting effort into chest compressions versus exhalation breaths, and the space taken up in the medical kit for a full face sealing mask (versus those fold up face masks that are essentially worthless). If you have space for a mask and anticipate a two person CPR situation there really no reason to not have a rescue breathing mask available even if the benefit is marginal. I just use the space in my kit for things that I think are more valuable like compression bandages.

Stranger