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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When most people think about lifesaving trauma care, they picture dramatic actions. Applying a tourniquet, packing a wound, performing CPR, opening an airway, rushing a patient to surgery. Those actions matter. Severe...
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 partn...
Ten years of Stop the Bleed and patrol-officer tourniquet training succeeded. Civilian EMS now arrives to f...
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 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...
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...