Download First Aid Apps Before You Need Them
Install the official first aid app tonight, so it's on your phone the day you're the one who has to act.
- Cost
- Free
- Time
- Under 15 min
- People
- Solo / Duo
- Where
- Anywhere
- Bring
- Nothing in particular
Why this matters
In an emergency nobody searches the internet, reads three conflicting results and evaluates sources - they freeze or guess. An official app gives step-by-step guidance immediately, works without signal, and is written by the same bodies that train paramedics. It takes two minutes to install and costs nothing until the day it matters.
How to do it
Install a first aid app from a recognised body - the Red Cross and St John Ambulance both publish free ones - and make sure the content is downloaded for offline use. Signal is exactly what you won't have when you need it.
While you're in your phone settings, do the rest of this list too:
- Turn on Medical ID or the equivalent. This lets emergency responders see your blood type, allergies, conditions and emergency contacts from a locked phone. Learn how to check someone else's, too - it's accessible from the emergency call screen on most phones.
- Save non-emergency numbers as contacts: your local urgent care line, poison control, the non-emergency police number, a crisis line.
- Download offline maps for areas you travel through. Useful for helping someone lost as well as yourself.
- Consider a cardiac responder app like GoodSAM or PulsePoint if you're CPR trained, which alerts you to nearby cardiac arrests.
- Add a defibrillator locator, or note where the nearest one to your home and work is.
Do this in five minutes over dinner and get everyone at the table to do it at the same time. Individually it's a task nobody prioritises; collectively it takes one round of drinks.
Check once a year that the offline content is still downloaded after phone updates.