P0102 - Parent Attitudes Towards Stop the Bleed Training for High School Students

Background: The leading cause of preventable death after injury is uncontrolled bleeding. Stop the Bleed (STB) is a national first-response training campaign shown to effectively train civilians in the basic skills of external bleeding control. To improve trauma mortality and reduce bystander response disparities, widespread training of high school students has been proposed, and many states have passed legislation to include basic life support training in schools. Prior to implementation of STB training, it is important to understand parental attitudes regarding training of high school students. Here we report an evaluation of parent attitudes towards implementing STB training from three high schools in Seattle, Washington.

Methods: We distributed an electronic survey to a random sample of 759 parents of students from three urban high schools (one private, two public) in the Seattle area. We asked participants about their awareness of STB, the acceptability of training high school students in STB, and reasons why parents would or would not want their children involved. Fisher’s exact test was used to assess for differences in responses between parents who did or did not report experiencing trauma.

Results: We received 120 total responses (response rate 16%). Most parents were between the ages of 40-59 years (88%) and 44% of parents were parents of children from a public school. The majority of parents (86%) were not aware of STB prior to the survey and 47% reported they themselves were interested in becoming trained in STB after completing our survey. Most (93%) parents reported they would want their child trained in STB, and 88% of parents felt their child would likely need to use this training one day. Of parents who responded to the statement “A trauma or serious injury has impacted my family,” 42% agreed, and there were no significant differences between parents’ trauma experience and preferences regarding training (Table 1). Nearly all parents (93%) disagreed with the statement, “I don’t think high school students should have to try to save someone’s life.”

Conclusion: Among this sample of Seattle area high school parents, awareness of STB training was low but the majority after learning about it indicated wanting their child trained in STB. Few parents were worried about potential adverse effects of the training and most believed that their child would need to use it sometime in their lives. Past experience of trauma or injury was not associated with differences in responses. Little is known about high school parent attitudes towards STB, and these findings suggest parents are generally supportive of implementing STB training programs for high school students. These results were limited by low response, partly due to data collection coinciding with the COVID-19 pandemic, which impacts the generalizability of our results.