After a recent tumble down a flinty stretch of downhill I realised that my non-existent first aid kit was an embarrassment, thanks to my fellow riders for bailing me out with sterile wipes, tape and other stuff to stem the flow of claret from my mangled shins. (luckily we have a vet in our group whose opinion is always valued post-crash. She occasionally does a nice job of sewing up our most reckless rider)

Lessons learned… I am now compiling the definitive mtb First Aid kit. A happy balance between comprehensive field hospital (heavy but effective) and a packet of small elastoplast (light but not cutting the mustard…)

What are the top bits of kit to include. Is there a supplier that’s done all the research and sells it complete already…? Suggestions if you please?!

I have a life systems kit, cant remember the name but its RRP was £15 (F&T 3 for £15 deal) and I up armour it with foil blanket, disposable saline pod!, tampon and cling film (wrapped around the foil blanket).

Why? Foil blanket: keep patient warm, attract attention; saline, wash wounds/eyes; tampon, stem blood flow (break open and bind tightly in wound), cling film, wrap wounds in to hold bandages in-place & keep dry clean.

Can’t go far wrong with a load of triangular bandages, lint or similar and some flexi-splints. Plasters for small wounds if you really must.

Ducktape. You’ll be suprised what you can do with it when you can see your bone.

Funny you should ask that, one of our group took a major tumble after hitting a Bedouin’s sheep at high speed on a rather sporty descent last weekend. Since I had to use some of my stuff I have reviewed my first aid kit which now includes:

For my own safety:
Resuscitation shield
Latex gloves

For bleeds & cuts:
2 non-adherent dressings
Extra large adherent dressing
Assortment of plasters including butterfly plasters

Breaks (collar bones, etc):
Triangular bandage

Misc:
2 cleansing wipes
2 sachets antibiotic ointment
1 sachet burn gell (hot disc brakes – ouch)
Micropore tape

In case I forget in the heat of the moment:
St John’s resuscitation/CPR aide memoir.

All in a nylon pouch about 8 by 3 inches. Total weight, 100g.

I have never found a first aid kit on sale that contained just the right things I wanted. Or they come with extra things that are unnecessary, such as scissors. Buy a cheap one and then amend the contents to suit. And then hope you never need it.

and a venflon :D.

Various sizes of various dressings upto about 6″ square, roll of white tape (whatever its called), a couple of old tubigrips, foil blaket, emergency shelter/sleep sack, pasters, CPR mask, proper scisors (for removing clothing in a hurry). Fits in a 8″x4″ nylon pouch (just, excluding the sleep sack).

Don’t laugh, but I always carry womens sanitary towels in my first aid kit. Seems silly, but they are designed to soak up large amounts of bodily fluids are (semi)sterile and take up very little space. Normal gause dressing on a bad bleed, then said towel and pressure and you are better off than trying to make do with the pitiful bandages found in most first aid kits.

BTW, I don’t carry a resusiaid in my first aid kit. It’s in the top pocket of my backpack. The reason being is that the firstaid kit sometimes gets buried under jackets or other stuff in the back pack. If you need a resus mask it’s life and death, seconds count. Getting to it instantly can help.

took a major tumble after hitting a Bedouin’s sheep

This wasn’t the Quantocks, was it?

I carry a FFD on some rides.
http://www.cadetdirect.com/order1.php?pg=295

Things I carry with me include a CAT and a FFD from my Army kit (just in case), some of those steristrip things, nitrile gloves and some gauze. I’ve stopped taking the stuff that you jamb into a wound to stop catastophic bleeding in under three minutes, but do take that with me when I am on the range.

I’ve topped up my old faithful Gregson Pack first aid kit with a selection of different size/shape wound dressings from the chemist and a load of micropore and support tapes to strap them on with.

Inspirational as expected. Thanks AW for photos and everything. I’ve got an old dry bag which is a good starting point. Cadetdirect looks reasonable vfm to get the contents that I don’t yet have…
Thanks again.

For general biking kit, you don’t need a lot. I’ve done a bunch of specific outdoors-tailored REC first aid courses and they always spec a pretty minimalist kit and some nifty improv. Stuff that you wouldn’t think of as first aid gear, like sanitary towels and tampons, work best, but near in mind you need to get pursue on it as well, so bandaging is a good thing to learn properly. Gaffer tape’s an essential as well. Clotting packs aren’t recommended due to allergy and “stuffing things into open wounds in a non-sterile environment” issues. I still carry one, mind.

Re Splints, particularly leg splints: last course I did, related to mountain first aid, we were told that it’s not covered in detail any more. If you’ve got a casualty with sufficient damage to need immobilisation and extraction then: 1) so many people splinted badly and caused more damage (particularly going on the old advice of “move to an anatomically correct position”), and 2) first thing the MRT will do is cut off what you’ve done and vac-splint. Best thing to do is to keep the casualty comfortable, whatever position the limb’s in, pack around them to immobilise and then just wait.

Also for the record – don’t bother with triangular bandages, they’re pointless. There’s nothing you can do with one that you can’t do, usually more comfortably, with another more versatile bit of kit.

This seems to crop up every few months, and we get great long lists of all the gubbins that then get carted around the country side.

Duct tape and handkerchief.

That’s it.

These two, plus the knowledge to use them will get you sorted out.

Space blankets, antiseptic wipes, bandages, splints, gloves, cpr kit, are all not needed in my opinion.

Knowledge….

Mobile telephone or sat phone.

I can understand the idea behind tampons as a dressing if there is nothing else available. If you are going to go to a shop to buy them though why not just buy a sterile dressing instead? You can get big thick ones (the kind the army use for gunshot wounds). I guess its different for me though , if I patch a client up with a tampax which then gets infected because its not sterile I haven’t done my job right.

For major bleeds you need dressings and bandages (both sterile). They come in different shapes and sizes, some have the bandage attached and some dont. Bear in mind that most integrated dressing bandages are not long enough to be effective on anything other than a limb so check the lengths. You can get some several meters long that you could use on a chest wound for example. For a really bad bleed you might need to apply two dressings to stop it. If blood come through the second, medical advise is to remove them and start again with new ones. Do the math, you could run out of them quickly on a bad one.

On top of dressings and slings you could take foil blankets, pain killers, antihistamine, gloves, saline, scissors, tick removers, skin closures, spray skin, tape, rsas shield, cleansing wipes.

Think about worst case scenarios and go equipped for those..

Pyro – Member
Also for the record – don’t bother with triangular bandages, they’re pointless. There’s nothing you can do with one that you can’t do, usually more comfortably, with another more versatile bit of kit.

Apart from the intended use (immobilisation) they can be used for loads of other things in an emergency and may be the most versatile thing in any 1st aid kit. Yep you could improvise with an inner tube, gaffer tape or use up valuable sterile bandages… but they are small and light so why not carry them? I carry 4.

AMV – I would say they are the least thing. While you can use them for other bits, there’s nothing you can do with them that can’t be improv’d with something else, when used as a sling they’re ridiculously uncomfortable, and the newer lightweight paper-type ones that are in so many pre-packed kits are utterly useless in anthing other than a dry windless environment.

Oh, and tampons and sanitary towels are sterile…

As crickey says _ although I used used a triangular bandange once to make a sling – a little bit better than using an innertube.

Knowledge is the key. I rarely carry a first aid kit – only if going right into the mountains. its only a very limited range of injuries when a first aid kit will make any difference.

I am happy ‘carting’ 100g of gubbins around the countryside. Yes, it’s limited but it is first aid.

Some cash to pay off the Bedouin for his totaled sheep is also useful. I think they use coloured pebbles in the Quantocks.

just out of interest, what’s the value of absorbing a load of blood in a dressing as opposed to just applying pressure and letting any leakage, err, leak ?

or does a dressing help to spread the compression and avoid overdoing it ?

Pressure is what stops bleeding, not any specific dressing. Basically, if you press long enough, it will stop. Having loads of dressings tends to make people stop pressing to change them; defeating the object.
If you’re not used to seeing it, its very easy to over-estimate blood loss; its like Vimto in that a little bit goes a long way.

And duct tape will double up as a splints, as a pressure dressing, as a temporary steristrip, and will fix your bike too.

It also serves as an indicator of severity; can’t be fixed with duct tape?
Time to get help..

Hello, I’m a paramedic. I carry duct tape (wrapped round my pump.) If its a big day out and its remote riding I also carry zip ties.

Direct pressure will slow and stop bleeding. Dressing wounds can help provide that pressure and prevents contamination.

A small polycarbonate flask of rum for ‘disinfectant’ – apparently there are other uses. 🙂

Plus duct tape.

For those non-compressible wounds 😉

pyro. agree on those paper ones but why try to improvise a sling when you can actually use one? A properly tied one is more comforable than an inner tube or a t-shirt and 4 take up less space and weigh less than a pack of lambert and butler.. Other uses – supporting a moving dressing (knee or elbow for eg), eye covering over a patch, protecting a dressing from the elements, elevating a bleed, packing round an impaled object before dressing, using as extra wrapping for a torso or head dressing, immobilizing a head in a suspected spinal… loads of uses… Yep you could use all manner of things to do these things, or you could put a sling in your first aid kit.

Imagine having a serious and painful injury wrapped up in duct tape… blood awful getting that stuff off and most likley any injury will be made worse in the process.

The point Im trying to make about tampons is that surely a dressing designed to stop a wound bleeding is the right thing to use to … er… stop a wound bleeding. Sure you could use a tampax, t-shirt, table cloth, wooly hat, loaf of bread, your hand etc but if you are going to all the trouble to put together a first aid kit surely you should be putting wound dressings in it and not tampax?? Not convinced that they are sterile either.

J3FFo – thats that stuff

Powdered turmeric stops bleeding. Take a balti with you and if you get back safe you’ve got a handy post ride snack.

Duck tape. That plus spare clothes = sort pretty much any 1st aid issue.

Go on, challenge me.

(personal kit = duck tape, one sanitary pad, pile of plasters and wipes, pencil and paper, asprinx2, rescusi mask)
(work kit = duck tape, some wound dressings + pads, plasters and wipes, eye wash, crepe bandage, safety pins, paper + pencil, a ‘how to’ 1st aid leaflet, rescici mask, asprinx1, plastic bags)

STRONG painkillers…the rest can be improvised !

Guiding kit is based on:

Big military/paramedic type dressing
Couple of smaller dressings
Duct tape
Triangular bandage
Wee bottle of antiseptic
Gauze (for wipes) & plasters (because people ask me for them)

Once again, the whole lot got used over the course of the season, including going through 3 triangular bandages (broken collarbones).

I don’t get the above comments about triangular bandages. It’s the right tool for the job (immobilising arm/shoulder), does the job much, much better than inner tube or spare clothing (both worse than useless for a broken forearm or wrist) and can be pressed into service for all kinds of other binding/fluid absorbing tasks. What’s not to like?

EDIT: Few other random bits and pieces as well, similar to matt’s kit above (pad & pencil, resus mask, etc.)

Not realy required a first aid kit in the wilds of Surrey in the last few months, but on at least three rides various people have borrowed sterile eye drops from mrs k (she has them for her contacts) to flush mud out from eyes – can’t remember the name but little plastic ampules, seem quite handy.

As an aside last first aid course at work (3 months ago or so) we seem to had dropped triangular bandages and were told not to use them, however we rarely evacuate a casualty, as a plus we were trained to self apply torniquets the new first aid flavour of the month?

Space blankets, antiseptic wipes, bandages, splints, gloves, cpr kit, are all not needed in my opinion.

Knowledge….

Really? Tell that to the chap with the broken collarbone walking down throught the woods on (IIRC) Darkside?, in the freezing cold twilight in nowt but a wet T shirt and showing all the signs of onset of hypothermia.

Drugs – I always carry emergency antihistemine, ‘buprofen and co-codamol. Only ‘cos they wont let me carry morphine vials 🙁

There is a product promoted on chainsaw and arborist sites called celox. Specifically meant clot serious blood flow, read some bumf claiming to stop arterial blood flow. Comes in small sachets so won’t take up much room in a bag.

Really? Tell that to the chap with the broken collarbone walking down throught the woods on (IIRC) Darkside?, in the freezing cold twilight in nowt but a wet T shirt and showing all the signs of onset of hypothermia.

Sorry, but a bit of what is essentially tinfoil maybe better than nothing, but will do very little to prevent exposure/hypothermia. If you are going to carry something for that situation, at least get a full size survival bag.

I’ll let the fact that a wet tshirt suggests a degree of unpreparedness go…

Space blankets are regarded as some kind of magical garment, but are amazingly over-rated in terms of what they actually achieve.

If you’re getting to the point where Quickclot is needed, then you’d better hope you are somewhere that the local air ambulance can get in very quickly.
Some military surgeons in Afghanistan were finding with Quickclot powder that the chemical reaction that stopped the bleeding was also causing burns that worsened the injuries – I think it now comes in a different form, but it is still quite advanced field treatment and possibly not a general component to a first aid kit.
I’d go with a decent field dressing, to get the pressure onto a bleeding wound, and back it up with a decent large crepe bandage over the top if needed. When I did a stint in A&E as a student nurse the type of pressure dressing used was large dressing pads that don’t look like they’ll absorb much, some plain gauze, and then crepe bandage over the top. Got a feeling that an army first field dressing would do a similar job.

adrenaline hydrochloride is popular for cuts in boxing.

A whistle is handy if you are on your own in the middle of nowhere.

I can’t escape the feeling that discussing adrenaline and haemostatic dressings in the context of what is essentially ‘pony trekking by bike’* is over-egging the pudding just a little.

*copyright TJ.

You are correct