Prehospital toolkit

Prehospital toolkit

Overview

Timely care and rapid transport save lives, reduce disability and improve long term outcomes. Prehospital emergency care is a key component of the health care system. Strengthening prehospital care can help address a wide range of conditions across the life course, including injury, complications of pregnancy, exacerbations of non-communicable diseases, acute infections and sepsis. The prompt provision of care and rapid transport from the scene to a facility can save lives, reduce disability and improve long-term outcomes.

The primary purpose of prehospital emergency care is to provide rapid assessment, immediate management and transportation of patients to appropriate medical facilities.  Strengthening health systems to deliver effective prehospital care - including linkages from communities to facilities and between facilities - is essential to meeting people’s health needs across the life course and is essential to a primary health care centred approach and making progress towards Universal Health Coverage.

Despite their proven potential to reduce disability and save lives, prehospital systems are often underdeveloped. Many health systems lack an enabling regulatory framework, coordination mechanisms, trained personnel, and adequate equipment and infrastructure, leading to delayed or inadequate emergency care and poor outcomes.  Establishing standard operational frameworks and protocols enhances the effectiveness of prehospital care, helping ensure that all individuals have access to timely, quality emergency care, regardless of their location.

WHO’s prehospital toolkit is a bundle of products designed to help strengthen prehospital emergency care systems. These tools are intended to help address commonly identified gaps in the main components of a prehospital system (governance, operations, prehospital provider training, equipment & medication, communication and quality improvement). They can be used to support the development of prehospital services in all resource settings.


Prehospital care delivery assessment

Prehospital Emergency care Assessment Tool (PEAT)
PEAT allows a situational analysis of a prehospital system, gap identification, and development of an improvement plan. It is a standardised survey tool for system mapping and identification of gaps to inform development plans.

PEAT forms part of a broader WHO collection of tools and resources titled the Health Systems Performance Assessment (HSPA) toolkit for UHC. The collection aims to strengthen country capacities to measure and monitor the capacities and performance of health systems and services in the context of PHC to drive progress towards UHC and health security. The HSPA toolkit for UHC includes metrics lists, assessment tools and other guidance resources to support countries to identify and fill data gaps and analyze and use data to monitor and improve performance at all levels of the health system.

Clinical capacity building

Operational guidance

Prehospital emergency care: operational guidance

WHO’s Prehospital emergency care: operational guidance provides detail on several key components of effective prehospital care systems. This guidance will be available on 15 July 2025.

It brings together in one publication guidance on:
  • Operational standards and resources, which address the governance and regulation of prehospital operations, including structured guidance on handover, equipment and medication lists for ambulances, and infection prevention and control. This section also introduces WHO’s prehospital standardized clinical form.
  • Emergency communication and dispatch centres, providing an overview of the key components, levels of organization, and core functions of dispatch systems. 
  • Medical control, which provides guidance for medical oversight of prehospital providers, and a framework and procedures for remote advising from a Medical Control Officer to support clinical decision-making in the field.
  • Prehospital clinical care protocols, which are system-wide clinical protocols for prehospital care of patients with specific clinical circumstances. Clinical protocols are aligned with the BEC course and tailored to the provider level (basic or advanced prehospital provider).

Some of the content from the operational guidance is also available for separate download below.

 

Tools for referral and transfer

Health care referral is the explicit direction of a person seeking care from one site, provider or platform of care to another. Immediate referral is referral for care that is urgently needed during the current health care encounter, usually involves the direct transfer of an individual to an appropriate facility or specialist for urgent care. Immediate referral often includes emergency transfer to higher levels of care. Transfer involves the movement of patients between different healthcare locations or stages of care.  The following tools are designed to support safe patient transfer—a high-risk period in care—and to ensure clear, effective communication between providers to prevent delays, errors, and harm.