A story this week by U.S. News & World Report details efforts by Dr. Lenworth Jacobs, director of Hartford Hospital’s Trauma Institute,  since massacres in Sandy Hook, San Bernadino and now Orlando to ensure bystanders know how to stop victims’ bleeding and save lives.

“You can bleed to death in 10 or 15 minutes,” Jacobs told the magazine. “The only person who can help you is you, yourself or Joe Citizen.”

From the story:

The realization that many people are dying who might be saved prompted Jacobs, a leader of the American College of Surgeons, to propose that the world’s largest surgeons’ organization take action. The group formed a committee made up of representatives of government, law enforcement, defense and medical officials to develop a national policy designed to increase survival from active shooter and mass casualty events.

“This is now taken seriously everywhere,” says Dr. Corey Slovis, director of emergency medicine at Vanderbilt Medical Center. “We’ve gone from ‘This can never happen’ to ‘I hope it never happens here.’ We all hope and pray it will never happen again, and we all fear that it will.”

With backing from the White House, the group drew up what is now known as the Hartford Consensus. The goal is to extend lessons learned from roughly 7,000 combat fatalities over the last decade to mass casualty events on the home front. To achieve it, they launched a national campaign called the Stop the Bleeding Coalition, made up of organizations as diverse as the American Academy of Pediatrics and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, many dedicated to public safety.

Hartford Hospital in 2014 installed the nation’s first bleeding control bags in public areas throughout the hospital campus. The hospital’s staff was trained to use the bleeding control bag to maximize survival from an active shooter or bombing incident.

“We are are living in a different world today and we must be prepared to act,” says Jacobs. “Everyone can save a life.”

To learn how to use a tourniquet, click here.