Penn Tactical Solutions
Field Notes
From the Field. For the Field.
Field Notes is where Penn Tactical Solutions publishes operational insights, clinical updates, and perspective pieces from active practitioners across emergency medicine, law enforcement, fire, and tactical medicine.
This is not a marketing blog. Every piece published here is written by someone who has worked the scenario, managed the call, or trained for the situation. We publish what we learn so others can be better prepared.
Have something worth sharing? We accept contributor submissions from qualified practitioners. Selected contributors receive a $25 gift card or a Penn Tactical t-shirt of their choice.
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Ten years of Stop the Bleed and patrol-officer tourniquet training succeeded. Civilian EMS now arrives to find tourniquets applied to wounds that did not need them. The protocol environment has not caught up. The inst...
In a suspected chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear contamination event, gross decontamination is...
The 2026 TCCC Guidelines carried forward the cricothyroidotomy airway pathway and added the most substantia...
You can hear a bad call before you step out of the truck. You can hear it in dispatch's voice, feel it in t...
The C-TECC Tourniquet Working Group identifies a recurring failure point: weak initial strap tension. A loo...
When CoTCCC publishes a new round of guidelines, the civilian tactical medicine and EMS communities ask t...
Crew Resource Management saved aviation. Medicine adopted it. EMS is still catching up. What pilots and a c...
The medicine is mostly the same as any other day. What changes at a major event is everything around it. A field note on what private-sector responders and trained cit...
A satirical field guide to the twenty most common ways instructors fail their students, drawn from real classrooms in the medical, tactical, and emergency response tra...
Here's the full piece, ready to copy and paste: A walkthrough of what happens in a typical 90-minute class, who it's for, and what you'll know how to do when you leav...
In December 2012, twenty children and six staff members were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. In the months that followed, a small group...
The countdown Fifty days from today, the largest sporting event ever staged in this region will begin. FIFA World Cup 2026 opens on June 11 in Mexico City, runs 39 day...
Twenty-seven years after Columbine, the way we respond to active threats and the bleeding that follows has been completely rebuilt. A paramedic's reflection on what ch...
Last night I went out with friends. The guy at the door checked IDs. That was it. No AED, no first aid kit, nobody watching the room. If something had gone wrong, the ...
Every round fired releases lead into the air. Learn how exposure happens, who is most at risk, and the simple steps that reduce long-term health impact without changin...
Police officers are often the first to arrive at critical incidents, where the first few minutes can determine survival. Patrol medical programs equip officers with th...