Medics surround a wounded U.S. soldier as he arrives at Kandahar Air Field in Afghanistan. Chris Hondros/Getty Images hide caption

Medics surround a wounded U.S. soldier as he arrives at Kandahar Air Field in Afghanistan.

About 10 years ago, Dr. Swaminatha Mahadevan was conducting research at a Nepalese hospital, when he witnessed something that would never have happened back home in California.

An older man had been in a road accident and was thrown from a car. He was lying on a hospital gurney. He was bleeding to death. "But no one was doing anything about it," says Mahadevan, an emergency medicine professor at Stanford University. "In the States, this man would have had a whole team of doctors leaning over him."

But in Nepal, there was no one. The hospital didn't have the staff or resources to save the man's life.

Mahadevan jumped into action, tying a sheet around the man's wounds to slow the bleeding. "I don't know if he survived," Mahadevan says. But the incident helped him realize something: Most poor countries just aren't equipped to deal with such emergencies. And yet, violence and injuries cause more deaths each year worldwide than HIV, tuberculosis and malaria combined.

Now researchers in London think tools developed for battlefield hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan can help fill in this gap. They want to adapt wartime medical techniques to help civilians in poor countries, which often have high rates of traffic accidents, building collapses, fires and gun violence.

With new technologies and some innovative tricks, Army medics have gotten really good at treating injured troops. Battlefield casualties have fallen sharply, says Richard Sullivan, an epidemiologist at King's College London. "It's one positive thing that has come out of these conflicts," he says.

Sullivan and his colleagues published a study last month in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine exploring advancements in battlefield medicine, along with recommendations for how to use them in low- and middle-income countries.

In many cases, the key to saving someone whether injured in a war zone or a traffic accident is to keep him from bleeding to death before he gets to a hospital, the team wrote.

Read more:

How Advances In Battlefield Medicine Can Save Civilians' Lives