Introduction: Even with well-organised emergency medical services, with well-educated and trained specialists and use of modern medical instruments, first aid still has a key role for the survival and faster recovery of injured persons. Most commonly, first aid is to carry out with simple instruments that we have at hand (for example: first aid kit). Serious external bleeding is a consequence of a bodily injury, where a quick and correct way of stopping the bleeding is highly important, so that we prevent even worse blood loss until the arrival of the emergency medical services. Purpose: The purpose of the diploma thesis is to present first aid for external bleeding. The goal of the thesis was to gain answers to the research questions: how to safely approach the bleeding injured person, which are the possible ways to stop the bleeding, what are the symptoms and signs of extensive blood loss and which are the steps of first aid, what is shock and how to treat hypovolemic shock. Methods: In the diploma thesis, we used the descriptive method of work with the review of the professional and scientific literature in the Slovenian and English languages. The literature is from the field of health care and first aid. It was found with the help of the Digital Library of the University of Ljubljana, through the CINAHL, Medline, PubMed and Google Scholar databases. Discussion and conclusion: In the constitution, the Slovenian legislation binds us to help an injured person in an emergency state. The problem arises because people are not obliged by law to acquire and renew knowledge of first aid. In crisis situations they become afraid, because they believe that their knowledge is not sufficient. As a consequence, the emergency medical services teams and other intervention units, bear a bigger burden.
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