Prehospital care is the care that ambulance services provide for patients with urgent or emergency care needs.

It starts when someone calls the ambulance service and ends when the patient has been conveyed to hospital.

In some cases, all the care a patient needs can be provided prehospitally and there is no need for transporting

them. Quality indicators are measurable aspects of an activity or the desired goal of an activity. Quality indicators

can be used to meaningfully assess performance or make comparison between individuals, organisations or systems.

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Currently, there is a strong focus on quick response times and other time intervals as well as survival of cardiac arrest as indicators of prehospital care quality. Whilst these indicators are important, measurement related to these indicators alone does not provide a holistic reflection of ambulance services' performance.

Prehospital care has evolved significantly over the last few decades and

therefore a broader and more up-to-date set of quality indicators is needed. 

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The AuStralian Prehospital care quality IndicatoR projEct is a 5-year research

project consisting of three phases that ultimately aim to develop and test

a suite of prehospital care quality indicators for the Australian setting. The

project is being supported by an Australian Government Research Training

Program Scholarship, and in part by a research grant from the Australian

and New Zealand College of Paramedicine (ANZCP).