ForcesTV interviews Brigadier Hodgetts on citizenAID

Hannah King interviews Brigadier Tim Hodgetts CBE for ForcesTV :

click image to watch interview

A new system, designed to improve public resilience in the event of a major terrorist attack, has been launched.

Using lessons learnt on the battlefield, military medical experts from the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine in Birmingham have been working alongside the police and the NHS.

They’ve been devising a set of simple instructions so civilians know how to react and save lives.

According to the Chief of the Metropolitan Police, a Bataclan or Nice-style terrorist attack here in the UK is a matter of when, not if.

Although Britain is well equipped to prevent such atrocities, the threat remains high.

Now, a new protocol developed jointly by military and civilian clinicians aims to plug a gap in the current advice, which tells the public to ‘run, hide and tell’, should they find themselves in the midst of a terrorist attack.

“We have learnt on the battlefield in conflict situations that if you unfortunately die, you are probably going to die quite quickly, and you are going to die from bleeding. So the skills we have to get far forward, and we have done this with individual soldiers, is to have the knowledge and equipment to actually stop external bleeding.”

– Brigadier Tim Hodgetts CBE, Medical Director, Defence Medical Services

The Citizen Aid instructions can be found on their website, and give members of the public tips on how to deal with casualties in the aftermath of a terrorist attack.

The instructions are as picture-based as possible, which prevents problems with language barriers or literacy.

It has been funded by charities and put together by experts who have given their time to develop a project they believe will make a difference.

Citizen Aid’s free app and instruction booklet will both be available in the New Year.