Skill guide · Medical Care

Medical Kits: What Actually Goes in Each One

This site's Tier 1-4 progression builds up a trauma kit, bulk medical supplies, a surgical kit, and a community cache, but always sorted by tier, never by where the kit actually lives. The Go-Bags & 72-Hour Kits guide's own health row just says "first aid kit" and points to First Aid Basics, which teaches technique, not contents. This guide fills that gap directly: what actually goes in a portable go-bag kit, a stationary home kit, a vehicle kit, and a Tier 4 community cache, and why each one is genuinely different from the others, not just a bigger or smaller version of the same list.

Which kit does which job

KitBuilt forThe one constraint that shapes it
Go-bag / IFAK Trauma, in the first minutes, away from home Weight and size; every item has to earn its place
Home medical kit Everyday injuries and illness, sheltering in place Space isn't scarce; depth and quantity matter more than portability
Vehicle kit Roadside trauma, the most statistically likely injury most people will personally see Extreme temperature swings degrade meds and adhesives faster than home storage
Community cache (Tier 4) Coverage across a neighborhood, not one household Access rules, training, and real legal limits on what can be stocked

The go-bag kit: a real IFAK, not a box of bandages

An Individual First Aid Kit (IFAK) is built around a narrow, specific job: stopping life-threatening bleeding in the first few minutes, before EMS arrives. That's a different design goal than a home first aid kit, and the contents reflect it.

ItemWhy it's in this kit specifically
Commercial tourniquet (CAT or SOFT-T) The core item; this site's own shopping list already calls for it, never an improvised substitute
Hemostatic gauze Packs a wound a tourniquet can't reach (the neck, armpit, groin)
Compression bandage (Israeli bandage) Holds pressure on a wound hands-free once it's packed
Chest seal For a penetrating chest wound; not currently stocked anywhere else on this site, and it's a standard IFAK item
Nitrile gloves, 2+ pairs Bleeding control means direct contact with someone else's blood
Trauma shears Cutting clothing away from a wound fast, without a blade near skin
Permanent marker Write the tourniquet application time directly on the tourniquet or the patient's skin; EMS needs that time, and it's the detail people forget to pack
Emergency blanket Shock and blood loss both drop body temperature fast

This kit is small on purpose

Every item above earns its place because it treats the handful of injuries that actually kill people before help arrives: uncontrolled bleeding, an airway problem, or shock. It is not a substitute for the home kit below; a full, bulk range of bandages, ointments, and OTC medications belongs there instead, not crammed into this small trauma-focused kit. That's separate from the few days of each person's actual prescription medication that Go-Bags & 72-Hour Kits already calls for packing in the bag itself; that still belongs in the go-bag, just not inside this kit specifically. See First Aid Basics for how to actually use a tourniquet and pack a wound, and consider a real Stop the Bleed course; owning this kit isn't the same as knowing how to use it under pressure.

The home medical kit

This is the kit that has room to be complete. It absorbs everything this site's own Tier 1-3 Medical Care shopping list already calls for, consolidated into one list instead of a tier-by-tier drip feed, plus the baseline the American Heart Association and American Red Cross recommend for any home kit.

CategoryContentsNote
Wound care baseline 2 absorbent compress dressings (5x9 in), 25 assorted adhesive bandages, 10 yd adhesive cloth tape, 5 antibiotic ointment packets, 5 antiseptic wipe packets, gauze rolls and roller bandages, sterile gauze pads The AHA/Red Cross first aid guidelines' own minimum-contents table
Beyond the baseline 2 packets aspirin, hydrocortisone ointment, an instant cold compress, a breathing barrier with a one-way valve, 2 pairs nonlatex gloves, tweezers, a non-mercury oral thermometer Same source; rounds out the basics for burns, allergic skin reactions, and CPR
This site's Tier 1 additions Digital thermometer, pulse oximeter, basic OTC medications (pain relievers, antihistamines, anti-diarrheal, antacids), a 14-day supply of every household prescription Already on the shopping list; belongs in this kit specifically, not just "somewhere in the house"
This site's Tier 2 additions Manual blood pressure cuff, stethoscope, otoscope, SAM splints, a sterilization method (pressure cooker or alcohol burner), bulk gloves/masks/gauze/tape For when a hospital visit isn't realistic for anything short of a true emergency
This site's Tier 3 additions Suture/staple kit, dental kit, a real medical library (Where There Is No Doctor and similar) Get real training before using the suture kit; owning it isn't the same as knowing when and how

Store it as one kit, not scattered supplies

A first aid kit that's actually a shoebox in one closet plus a bottle of aspirin in another plus the thermometer in a junk drawer doesn't function as a kit under stress. Consolidate everything above into one container, in one known location, and make sure every adult in the household knows where it is.

The vehicle kit

The Vehicle Emergency Kit & Roadside Basics guide already covers the mechanical side of a vehicle kit; the medical side of it deserves its own note, because a parked car is a genuinely hostile storage environment that nothing else on this site addresses.

Warning

A parked car runs hotter than any medication label allows for

Interior temperatures in a parked car can exceed 140°F even on a mild, sunny day, in Utah's own summer heat often well before noon. Most medications are only tested and labeled stable at 68-77°F room temperature; degradation from heat exposure is a real chemical breakdown, not a cosmetic issue, and a pill or auto-injector that looks completely normal can already be compromised. Epinephrine auto-injectors, nitroglycerin, insulin, and albuterol inhalers are specifically heat-sensitive and are poor choices to leave in a vehicle kit long-term. Adhesive-backed items aren't exempt either: adhesive bandages and medical tape genuinely lose their stick with repeated heat cycling, the same failure mode that leaves a bandage that won't stay on when you actually need it. A tourniquet's nylon webbing and plastic buckle are about the only thing in this kit that's genuinely heat-indifferent; treat everything else, adhesives included, on a rotation schedule between the car and the house rather than leaving it parked for months.

Beyond that heat caveat, the vehicle kit's trauma contents should mirror the go-bag IFAK above: the CDC puts car crashes at roughly 2.1 million emergency room visits a year in the US, making a roadside accident one of the most statistically likely serious trauma events most people will ever personally witness, and the same tourniquet-and-hemostatic-gauze logic applies just as much there as anywhere else.

The community cache (Tier 4)

This site's Tier 4 Medical Care content describes a "Shared Medical Cache" in one general sentence: bulk trauma and medication stock, sized for the neighborhood, with access rules agreed in advance. Here's what that actually looks like in practice.

Real sizing logic exists for this, and it doesn't have to be invented from scratch. ANSI/ISEA Z308.1, the standard behind OSHA's workplace first aid kit requirement, defines kits at 10-, 25-, 50-, and 100-person scales, with a common industry benchmark of one kit per 25 people. That's a reasonable starting point for sizing a neighborhood cache: count the households you're actually planning to cover, and size against the nearest bracket rather than guessing. Worked example: 15 households averaging 3.5 people each is about 53 people, so round up to the 100-person bracket, or combine a 50-person and a 10-person kit to cover it more precisely.

ComponentWhat it actually means
Community medical reserve Bulk trauma and medication stock, sized using the ANSI benchmark above, not per-household guesswork
Trained-responder roster Names, skills, and availability, kept current; the actual point is knowing who to call fast, not a binder nobody reads
Access rules Decided in advance, in writing, before the cache is needed, not improvised during an emergency
Shared reference copies Distributed across multiple households so losing one copy doesn't lose the only one

The real legal line on stockpiling antibiotics

Prescription antibiotics legally require a licensed provider's direction; buying them without any prescription from an unlicensed source is illegal, not a gray area. There is a legitimate path: some physicians write a standby prescription for exactly this purpose, and several US-based telemedicine services fill emergency-use antibiotic prescriptions through licensed physicians and pharmacies. A community cache that wants to include antibiotics should go through one of those legitimate channels, ideally with a household member's own doctor, not treat this as a workaround.

What about pets

Veterinary kits aren't covered here. Pet Evacuation & First Aid Basics already has a real, species-specific kit-building section, gauze, vet wrap, a properly sized muzzle, saline, plus genuinely different needs for reptiles and small mammals, and duplicating it here would just be a worse copy of a guide that already does the job.

Sources