Foundations of Prehospital Emergency Care

Study guide

The component that decides what kind of responder you are before it decides what you can do. Nearly half its questions sit on airway management and resuscitation, but the ones people lose marks on are the earlier ones — scope of practice, scene safety, who to call and when — because they feel like common sense until a scenario makes two reasonable-looking answers available.

The responder’s role and communication

Scope of practice is the spine of this block. A question describing an intervention is usually asking whether it is yours to make, not how to make it.

• Competence and scope of practice are two different tests, and a scenario can satisfy one without the other. The safe answer is almost never the one justified by how quickly help is expected to arrive.
• Communicating with the patient is assessed as clinical practice, not manner: what you establish, what you explain, and what you record.
• Handover and calling for help both have an expected content. Questions describe an incomplete handover and ask what is missing.

Scene, triage and resources

What happens between arriving and touching the patient. The sequence is the assessment.

• Scene safety comes before patient contact in every scenario, and questions test whether you will break that order when the patient sounds urgent enough.
• Triage is a small number of questions but a high-value one: know which tool applies to which situation, and that triage is a sorting decision rather than a treatment decision.
• Knowing which resource or role to request, and when, is assessed separately from knowing what to do yourself.

Assessment and airway anatomy

The primary assessment, and the anatomy that makes the airway steps make sense. The smallest block here, and the one that underpins the largest.

• The primary assessment has an order, and the order exists because each step can kill the patient before the next one matters.
• Airway anatomy questions ask you to link a structure to what goes wrong with it — which is why the anatomy and physiology topic is worth revising alongside this one.
• Level of response is recorded with a defined scale rather than described in your own words.

Airway management, choking and medical gases

The largest single block in the topic. Manoeuvres, adjuncts, choking, and the gases themselves.

• Each airway manoeuvre and adjunct has indications and contraindications, and the harder questions describe a patient for whom the obvious choice is the wrong one.
• Choking is assessed as a sequence that changes with the patient’s ability to cough and with their age. Know the branch points rather than a single algorithm.
• Medical gases are examined on the equipment as well as the clinical decision: cylinder handling, delivery devices and which device suits which flow. Check current guidance for any target figure — the app deliberately states none.

Resuscitation and defibrillation

Recognising arrest, basic life support, and the AED. Guidance-driven, and the guidance is dated.

• Recognising cardiac arrest is its own criterion, separate from managing it, and agonal breathing is the classic distractor.
• The AED sequence includes what you do around the shock — pad placement, safety, and what happens between analyses — not just delivering it.
• Special circumstances change the sequence. Drowning and hypothermia are the two the bank returns to most.

In the exam This component rewards you for knowing the ORDER of things: scene before patient, assessment before intervention, recognition before management. When two answers both describe correct actions, the question is usually asking which comes first. All resuscitation content follows the Resuscitation Council UK 2025 guidelines — check the current version, because this is exactly the material that gets revised.