July 8, 2024

For Immediate Release:

Africa Fire Mission (AFM) announces a grant award of $44,000 from the Laerdal Foundation for research to begin a Stop the Bleed® training program in Sub-Saharan Africa. The project will be led by Nancy Moore, MSW, LISW-S, Kirstin Henley, MD (Baylor College of Medicine), and Africa Fire Mission volunteers beginning November 2024 in Nairobi, Kenya.

Through this research, we aim to decrease death and disability from life-threatening bleeding through practical, contextualized, skill training for First Responders and community members in Sub-Saharan Africa. AFM’s expertise in developing results driven fire prevention programs in Africa will be used to replicate a train-the-trainer model to facilitate the research over the next 3 years.

Stop the Bleed® is a 5-step curriculum that teaches basic skills in bleeding control at the scene of an accident, empowering bystanders to help a victim with a bleeding wound until professional help arrives. Stop the Bleed® curriculum was originally developed, studied and implemented in the United States by a federal interagency workgroup convened by the National Security Council Staff. 

Stop the Bleed® has demonstrated success in saving lives across the globe, including contextualized training and research in Hyderabad and Bangalore, India which has demonstrated an increase in life saving bystander response from training Indian high school children in Stop the Bleed® techniques from 2018-2022.

Medical partners from the Ramaiah Medical College (Dr. Aruna Ramesh), the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (Dr. Vinay Nadkarni), Pediatric Simulation Training and Research Society (pediSTARS, Dr. Geethanjali Ramachandra), and the GVK Emergency Management Research Institute (Dr. Ramana Rao) launched and studied the program implementation from 2018-2022 in India, and currently serve as advisors for this project in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Africa Fire Mission will be partnering with the Kenya Council of Emergency Medical Technicians, Chief Fire Officers Association-Kenya and research partners Dr. Amelie von Arnim (Univ of Washington) and the Pediatric Emergency and Critical Care-Kenya (PECC-Kenya) fellowship training program, which will assist in scaling, advocating, and sustaining the Stop the Bleed® program in Africa for years to come.

For additional information for this project, please contact Nancy Moore, nancy@africafiremission.org or 513-620-4236. Donations to support the project can be made to:  https://www.africafiremission.org/donate 

Additional information about Africa Fire Mission and photos are available for media use here:  https://www.africafiremission.org/press