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.
Submit your own
This piece is for anyone who has taken a bleeding control class and been taught to pack a wound without being told what the packing is actually doing. It is also for providers who pack wounds regularly and have never ...
This piece is for anyone who has ever sat in a first aid class and been taught to "treat for shock" without...
Never Forget When You Don't Remember: What 9/11 Means for the Responders Who Inherited It This piece is for...
Trauma skills get you onto the team. Everything else determines whether you stay. A first-year tactical med...
Patrol medical programs do not fail because officers lack commitment or because agencies do not care. They ...
When most people think about lifesaving trauma care, they picture dramatic actions. Applying a tourniquet, ...
FIFA World Cup 2026 and the Semiquincentennial are coming to Philadelphia. Here is what residents across th...
I wasn't planning on writing this piece. On a rainy Sunday afternoon, looking for somewhere to go, my partner and I decided to check out the opened Pennsylvania Hospit...
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. Th...
In a suspected chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear contamination event, gross decontamination is not a delay in care. It is care. A look at how trauma and c...
The 2026 TCCC Guidelines carried forward the cricothyroidotomy airway pathway and added the most substantial tourniquet conversion language CoTCCC has ever published. ...
You can hear a bad call before you step out of the truck. You can hear it in dispatch's voice, feel it in the crew getting quiet, sense it in your gut. After twenty ye...
The C-TECC Tourniquet Working Group identifies a recurring failure point: weak initial strap tension. A look at why the first pull, not the windlass, decides whether b...
When CoTCCC publishes a new round of guidelines, the civilian tactical medicine and EMS communities ask the same question: which of these will show up in our world, ...
Crew Resource Management saved aviation. Medicine adopted it. EMS is still catching up. What pilots and a comedian can teach us about working bad calls.
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...