PLYMOUTH, Minnesota — Meg Soultz and Savahanna Wagner have been best friends for 20 years. The pair met in college while working on an ambulance together.
Wagner is now an internal medicine physician. Soultz is a police officer, paramedic and former school resource officer.
The Plymouth women took their combined 40+ years of experience in EMS and disaster medicine and created a kit to help save lives. But it was the Uvalde school shooting in 2022 that made them shift their focus to schools.
"I'm a mom and when Uvalde happened, I... just felt helpless. I felt like what in the world can I do to help and make our community safer? How can I contribute to the safety of where my kids go to school? Is there something I can do?" Dr. Wagner recalled.
Rescue in Color equips schools with color-coded bleeding control kits.
"It's often framed in this really scary, anxiety-provoking thing that is school violence and this uptick of school violence. But the truth is that ages 3 to 44, trauma is the number one cause of preventable death and active and uncontrolled hemorrhage is part of that," Dr. Wagner said.
The kits are designed to be easy to use with little to no training. Each kit has color coding guides that match the equipment needed to treat different injuries. For example, uncontrolled bleeding from a limb is color-coded in orange and matches with the orange tourniquet. It also includes directions on how to use the equipment.
"In an uncontrolled bleeding situation, we often talk about our first first responders. So when someone is bleeding really briskly, it's important to get care and it's important to get control of that within the first few minutes," Dr. Wagner said. "Often those first first responders are the bystanders or the witnesses or the people that have seen it."
The kits are also magnetic so they can be put in easy-to-reach places like a file cabinet. Dr. Wagner said the idea is to place them in decentralized locations and ideally, have one in each classroom.
Rescue in Color is now in 20 schools across Minnesota and nine states.
Bloom Early Learning & Child Care in Plymouth has a kit next to the fire extinguisher.
"Safety is first and foremost our number one priority for our children," said Rachelle Holm, executive director of Bloom Early Learning. "All of our staff are trained in first aid and CPR and those kinds of things. But if something like that happens, we need to be able to react quickly and it needs to be something very easy to do."
Dr. Wagner said they understand that having bleeding control equipment is a small piece of the puzzle.
"Prevention is incredibly important and we understand that. But preparedness really can lead to resilience, and power, and safety, as well," Dr. Wagner said.
Even though Rescue in Color focuses on schools, they have had interest from construction workers to food truck owners.
Individual kits can be purchased online, as well, for about $125.
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