Plastic Packaging Wrap for Patient Packaging

Bandages have been used in hemorrhage control since at least ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Roman times. The design remained unchanged until the fifth century BCE, when gauze was introduced. Modern bandages are relatively expensive and heavy and are not widely available in low-resource environments. Packaging wrap, sometimes called Saran wrap, cling film, cling wrap, or Glad wrap, is widely available in many countries. It is used commercially with handheld dispensers to bind goods to pallets for secure transport. In austere settings, packaging wrap has a large number of improvised medical uses. It can be used as a dressing to apply pressure to wounds, as covering for burns, to splint limb fractures, to occlude bowel evisceration, and to ensure the security of casualty cards. It can also be used to create an endotracheal tube tie, an improvised intravenous fluid pressure infuser, an improvised pneumatic limb tourniquet, or a head immobilizer for spinal immobilization. Large numbers of dressings can be created from a single dispenser, making this a cheap and light alternative to conventional dressings. Packaging wrap is not intended as a replacement for commercially available, approved products but rather to assist in packaging and for use in austere, remote and tactical environments, where space and weight are limited.