Donnellys Crossing Community Group

Emergency Preparedness

First Aid

A training pathway for the village — from the national certificate to advanced pre-hospital care.

When help is roughly 35 minutes away, the first responder is whoever happens to be standing there. Our aim is simple: enough trained people spread across the village that wherever something happens, someone nearby knows what to do.

The training pathway has three stages. Everyone starts at the bottom; most of us aim for the middle; a couple of us go all the way up.

  1. The national baseline

    New Zealand First Aid Certificate

    Unit Standards 6402, 6401, 6400

    About 12 hours · valid two years

    The starting point for everyone. It covers basic life support — CPR for adults, children and infants, using a defibrillator, choking, and the recovery position.

    It then covers providing first aid — serious bleeding, shock, burns, fractures and soft-tissue injuries, and recognising heart attack, stroke, asthma, seizure and diabetic emergencies — and managing an emergency scene: head, spinal and major trauma, multiple casualties, and decision-making under pressure.

    This certificate is the prerequisite for everything above it.

  2. The rural step — our target for all responders

    Outdoor First Aid

    Unit Standard 424, taught together with the base standards

    The base certificate assumes an ambulance arrives in minutes. Out here it won't. Outdoor First Aid is about caring for a patient for two to twelve hours before help arrives — working in isolation, improvising equipment from what's around you, and making the call on when and how to evacuate.

    In practice the course delivers the full base certificate and the outdoor standard together, so it's one course, not two. This is the practical target for all of our responders.

  3. The advanced tier

    Pre-Hospital Emergency Care (PHEC)

    Unit Standard 29321

    For when help is hours rather than minutes away — airway management, oxygen, taking and monitoring vital signs, using resuscitation equipment, and handling complex or multiple-casualty scenes.

    PHEC requires the base certificate first. We don't need everyone at this level — but it's worth having one or two responders in the village trained to it.

All of these certificates renew on a two-year cycle, so first aid training is a rhythm, not a one-off. We'll keep a rolling schedule so the village's cover never lapses.