I’m a bit overzealous about first aid kits considering that I have a kid with hemophilia, but you should all be equally zealous because you really never know what might happen. If you recall from my Armory Life Saver post you need to have several smaller first aid kits in your home but you need a couple trauma style kits in your safe room or armory.

Rudy’s Tip: Make sure you have first aid kits at minimum on every floor of your house. In the bathroom and kitchen is a good spot. If you have power tools that you use a first aid kit and maybe even a trauma kit is a must have in the shop. Don’t forget.

What’s the difference between a first aid kit and a trauma kit?

I thought you’d never ask! In my definition a first aid kit doesn’t have as much good stuff in it and is oriented towards dealing with minor injuries, cuts and scrapes, burns, that sort of thing. It’s basically your Band-Aid box with a bunch of other awesome stuff in it.

Trauma kits are targeted at dealing with more major injuries up to and including gunshot wounds, power tool accidents, and the like. This is the kit you use to try to stabilize someone until emergency services arrives, or if the situation is grid-down, this may be all you have to treat them.

Wait a minute. I have no idea how to treat a gunshot wound.

Nobody does until they learn. In all seriousness, you should get some decent training on dealing with more serious injuries. You can get basic EMT style training for free in most major cities and while it won’t make you an expert it gets you farther along than most.

While you probably won’t ever have to deal with a gunshot wound you need to know how to deal with major injuries no matter what the cause. The chances of you freezing up and not knowing how to react in a life threatening situation are significantly increased if you haven’t gotten training or practiced being responsive. Get training. Yesterday.

Ok. I’ll go sign up. Tell me what should be in a first aid kit!

Band-Aids. Lots of them. Different sizes too! Now that the obvious is behind us, recall that the purpose of a first aid kit is to treat minor cuts and scrapes. I like to include stuff to stop or slow bleeding as well. It’s always handy to be able to start treating a more major injury while someone else runs for the trauma kit.

First Aid kits should contain:

Gauze and Bandages

• A good size supply of Band-Aids of varying sizes. I’d say at least 30-40 of the larger ones while 20 or so of the smaller sizes will suffice.
• 10 each – Large and Medium Band-Aid adhesive pads (the square-ish gauze pads with adhesive around them)
• 10 each – Large and Medium gauze pads
• 2 rolls – 2″ Gauze
• 2 rolls – 1″ ‘Hurt Free Wrap’ (the soft elastic tape that sticks to itself)
• 2 rolls – 1″ Medical Paper Tape
• 10 Steri Strips

Medicinal

• Neosporin
• One small bottle each:
  • Ibuprofen
  • Acetaminophen
  • Aspiron
  • Immodium
  • Benadryl
• Hydrocortisone cream
• Vaseline

Equipment

• Alcohol pads
• Five chemical cold packs
• A small bottle of saline for irrigating wounds
• Small scissors – child safe craft scissors work good here
• A lighter
• A small package of sewing pins
• A good pair of tweezers – Don’t skimp here, you want a good set that line up properly
• A small bottle of alcohol based hand sanitizer
• Six pairs of examination gloves
• A CPR shield
• Celox or an equivalent hemostatic agent
• A mini-sharpie pen

Needless to say your over the counter kit here doesn’t have all this stuff in it. This will also seem like overkill and you may want to adjust the amounts of things based on how many folks are in your family. We go through band-aids like a knife through butter so it makes sense for us to have plenty, for example.

I’ve also added extra because I’m paranoid about not having enough and I’d rather have too much than not enough. So consider my amounts as guidelines, not the rule!

Great, now what about the Trauma Kit?

It’s basically an overpowered first aid kit. It should contain:

Gauze and Bandages

• The same stuff as in the first aid kit, just two or three times as much.
• Additional rolls of gauze bandage and tape in wider widths
• Several ACE bandages
• Four triangle bandages
• A dozen large Trauma Dressings
• A dozen feminine sanitary pads

Medicinal

Same as the first aid kit

Equipment

Same as the first aid kit with the addition of:

• A box of examination gloves (you will need more than one box to cover different sizes)
• A large bottle of saline irrigation
• A large bottle of hand sanitizer
• EMT Shears
• Two thermometers (I like the instant read ones, but keep a few ‘basic’ ones too)
• Splinting material of various sizes
• More Celox
• Two more CPR shields
• I also think it’s a good idea to have at least one pair of crutches lying around in a closet somewhere, but certainly not in your trauma bag.

These trauma bags seem a bit like overkill of course, but I’d rather be safe than sorry and most of this stuff doesn’t really go bad. I will use the trauma kit to stock the first aid kits as things get used up and then I refill the trauma kit before it gets too low.

I usually split the bandage and gauze amounts above into two bags with a set of medicinal supplies and equipment in each bag and get my two trauma bags that way. Same amounts total but easier to carry and sometimes you just don’t need to haul everything along with you!

What should I put these in?

That’s up to you.  You can buy purpose built bags for first aid kits and use those.  You can buy smaller plastic boxes and put them in duffel bags.  You could raid the local surplus store and see what they have.  It’s really up to you!  I personally use smaller purpose built bags for first aid kits and bandages inside the trauma kit and the trauma kits are in duffel bags.

Wrapping it up

I hope this helps. Don’t view this as gospel but as a starting point. Modify amounts appropriately and keep up your rotation for things that can expire. And like I said … GO GET TRAINING.

With the exception (arguably) of the emergency lighting most of the contents of the armory in my first post were oriented around defensive weaponry. That stuff is important to have as I believe that you shouldn’t bring a knife to a gun fight so to speak. Yet there is an entire class of purely defensive items that deserve an equally important slot in your closet, err survival armory.

Medical Supplies

This is by far the most critical thing to have. You should have several first aid kits in your home for general use and emergencies. I like to keep one in the kitchen with my emergency lighting stash and one in each bathroom. You also need to have at least one trauma kit that has the supplies to handle major injuries. This is even more important if you live in a rural setting or are in an area that takes a while for emergency services to arrive.

Rudy’s Tip: Be sure to customize the contents of your kits based on any special needs your family may have. For example, one of my kids has hemophilia so we try to keep blood clotting agents like Celox around. I would suggest having Celox in your trauma kit anyways but you get my point!

Communications Gear

There are two types of communications gear you want to have around. First, always have at least one charged cell phone in your armory to contact emergency services if you ever need to. You can’t rely on your land line being available if someone is breaking in, for example. Often the first thing a home invader will do is cut the phone line on the outside, disabling any automatic dialing that an alarm may do and preventing the residents from calling out.

Rudy’s Tip: Use an older cell phone for this. It doesn’t have to have service! Federal law mandates that every cell phone, whether it has service or not, must be able to dial 911. Be forewarned though that many phones will beep loudly or make another noticeable noise if you call 911. You may want to have one that doesn’t in order to avoid detection by a home invader if necessary.

The second type of communications gear you want to have is some basic two way radios. Ideally you’ll have a full on communications plan for your family, which I will post about in the future, but if not then you should have four handheld walkie-talkie style radios to aid in communication between family members.

Body Armor

Now this sounds a little paranoid, I know. But for any type of home invasion or civil disturbance type emergency it will be important to have body armor around. Modern body armor that is suitable for casual home use as opposed to every day military style use is relatively inexpensive and is actually readily concealable. The days of looking like a baseball umpire with an inflated chest protector under your shirt are gone.

Body armor isn’t intended to keep you safe when the rifle bullets are flying but you can get good stuff that will keep your torso relatively secure against most handgun rounds. We’ll talk about it in a bit more detail in the drilldown post.

Wrapping it up

Hopefully this post helps you understand that a properly outfitted survival armory not only includes weaponry but also defensive items as well. You shouldn’t consider your armory preparations complete until the above areas are also covered. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions!