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.
