What Belongs in a First Aid Kit

Most households technically own a first aid kit. Far fewer own one that would actually perform in the moment it exists for — because a kit is not really a product, it is a system: the right supplies, in a known place, in working condition, that someone under stress can navigate. This lesson gives you the standard list, and then the three things the list cannot give you.

Start with the standard: the ANSI Class A list

There is no need to guess what a kit should hold. The ANSI/ISEA Z308.1 standard defines it, and Class A is the baseline built for the common injuries: minor cuts, burns, sprains, and eye injuries. It is the same floor OSHA-conscious workplaces stock to, and it makes a better home baseline than any retail kit’s marketing list.

Class B doubles the quantities for higher-risk settings and adds items like a tourniquet and a splint — worth it for workshops, farms, and boats.

Buy one, or build one?

Honest answer: either works — if you know what you are looking at. Genuine ANSI/ISEA Z308.1 Class A kits are easy to find online and at hardware and safety-supply stores, and the tell is the standard printed on the label ("ANSI/ISEA Z308.1-2021 Class A"), not the piece count. The piece count is exactly the trap in the other direction: the classic "200-piece first aid kit" is usually a hundred and fifty adhesive bandages in a thin plastic box — an impressive number, missing the trauma pads, the gloves, the breathing barrier, and everything else that handles a real emergency. When you are comparing kits, ignore the big number and check for the short list that matters: trauma pads, gloves, a breathing barrier, a real roller bandage, and a case that survives being dropped.

Building your own from the table above costs about the same, teaches you the contents as you assemble it — which pays off the day you need to find something fast — and lets you buy quality where it counts: shears that actually cut clothing, and a case with compartments instead of a jumble.

What about clotting powders and hemostatic dressings? Products like Celox and QuikClot — agents that accelerate clotting for severe bleeding — are real, effective tools with a place in the right kit. For a standard home kit, the honest guidance: direct pressure with a trauma pad handles the overwhelming majority of bleeding you will ever meet, and a hemostatic product is an upgrade, not a requirement. Where they genuinely earn a slot: vehicle kits, workshop and farm kits, hunting and remote-outdoors kits — anywhere serious bleeding could meet a long wait for help. If you add one, add the knowledge with it: they work with firm pressure, not instead of it.

One kit is really three kits

The phrase "first aid kit" covers three different jobs, and mixing them up is how kits disappoint:

• The workplace kit is a compliance object — ANSI-classed, inspected, stocked for anyone-and-everyone. It is the baseline this lesson’s table describes.

• The home kit is the workplace kit plus your household: the personal medication layer, the children’s dosages, the epinephrine auto-injector if your family carries one, and the paper layer with your doctors and poison control. It is allowed to be personal — that is the point.

• The vehicle kit is the one most likely to meet a serious emergency and the one most people skip. Build it slightly tougher: add the hemostatic dressing, a flashlight, and an emergency blanket. One honest caveat nobody prints on the box — a car’s interior heat is hard on supplies. Ointments, medications and adhesives degrade in a baking trunk, so the vehicle kit gets checked at every audit, and temperature-sensitive personal medications ride with you, not in the car.

Beyond the checklist: the personal layer

The standard covers the injuries everyone shares. Your kit also has to cover the emergencies your household is actually likely to meet:

• Personal medications: a small supply of daily prescriptions, clearly labeled, rotated when you refill them.

• Emergency medications where they apply: an epinephrine auto-injector for the allergic family member, a rescue inhaler for the asthmatic one — with the kit or with the person, and everyone should know which.

• The right pain relievers for the right people: acetaminophen and ibuprofen for adults, and children’s formulations if there are children. Never aspirin for kids.

• The paper layer: emergency contacts, the household’s medication and allergy list, and your doctor and poison-control numbers (1-800-222-1222) — because the phone that holds all of that might be dead, lost, or in someone else’s pocket.

Where it lives matters

A perfect kit nobody can find is a box of gauze. Three placement rules do most of the work. One known home: the kitchen or a hallway closet shelf beats the bathroom — medicine cabinets run humid, which is hard on adhesives and medications — high enough for child safety, labeled, and never buried behind the holiday decorations. A second kit for the car, because the injuries that need you most rarely happen next to the hall closet. And tell people — the babysitter, the visiting grandparent, the kid old enough to fetch it.

Keep it alive: the ten-minute audit

Kits die quietly — the ointment expires, the cold pack got used at last summer’s game, the scissors migrated to the junk drawer. Twice a year, tied to the smoke-detector battery ritual:

1. Check every expiration date — ointments, wipes, medications, eye wash.

2. Restock what has been used — the bandage count never recovers on its own.

3. Re-seat the loaners — scissors and tape wander; bring them home.

4. Re-check the paper layer — contacts change, prescriptions change, and children’s dosages change fastest of all.

5. Put it back in its home, and say so out loud to the household.

Ten minutes, twice a year, is the difference between owning a kit and having one.

Put it into practice

Training scenario:

Saturday afternoon: your nephew comes off his bike hard in front of the house — a deep, gravel-studded scrape down his forearm, bleeding steadily and dirty. Your brother sprints inside for the kit and comes back holding the open box, calling out what he sees: bandage wrappers from last time, an ointment tube dated two years ago, and no gloves he can find.

Walking it through: right now the wound outranks the inventory. Pressure with the cleanest absorbent thing in the box — gauze or a trauma pad, because a wound this dirty gets pressure first and cleaning after the bleeding is controlled — bare hands washed if the gloves are truly gone, and the expired ointment simply gets skipped. The kit still worked, barely, because pressure and a covering are its irreducible core. But every gap your brother called out was preventable by the ten-minute audit: restocking after last time, the expiration check, the gloves in their place. Next weekend’s job assigns itself — and this time, put the kit’s location and contents in front of the whole household, because today’s rescuer was someone who had never opened it.