Hasta La Ideas

Trauma shears (top photo) are those angled scissors that emergency personnel use to cut through material to extricate someone or expose an injury for treatment. I first saw them during my ambulance days and while I was amazed that they could sever seatbelts with ease, I remember being surprised at how flimsy they were; they had plastic handles and were lighter than I expected. On the design front they had a few elements differentiating them from regular scissors: They were stubby, sharply angled, the interior sides of the blades had little lines cut into them, and there was a kind of flange at the point that would ride flat along someone’s skin if you were cutting off a pant leg or similar.

I never once used them in the field—design school and ID ultimately proved a stronger draw than wearing a blue jacket and doing CPR—but apparently, trauma shears suck. “They are imprecise and made of cheap, shoddy materials with a blade that dulls quickly,” says New-Mexico-based ER doctor Scott Forman. “People just throw them away.”

Years ago Forman set out to design a better pair of trauma shears. With titanium-nitrate coated blades and a carabiner integrated into the handle, Forman’s design proved popular with local EMTs, and soon Forman had started a company, applied for a patent and cranked out over 1,000 pairs.

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