Keeping a trauma casualty warm is not about comfort, it’s about survival. The body loses approximately 15% of its clotting factors for every degree of temperature drop, which means hypothermia directly impairs the body’s ability to stop bleeding. Combined with blood loss and the metabolic changes that follow, this creates what’s known as the lethal triad: hypothermia, coagulopathy, and metabolic acidosis. Each one makes the others worse. Managing temperature by using hypothermia blankets, removing wet clothing, insulating under, over, and around the casualty is a critical part of trauma management at any level of care.
