Shifting First Aid: A Socio-Historical Analysis of Tracing the Changing Relations Between First Aiders and the UK Ambulance Service From 1941 to 2020

Particular attention has been paid to the professionalisation of the ambulance services and how new specialist forms of technologies have allowed healthcare professionals to operate beyond the walls of the hospital. Less attention has been paid to how these roles and spaces were once only occupied by first aiders. This article describes how first aid provision is historically situated and reproduced within and as part of this wider system of care by providing a detailed account of histories of emergency care and the changing rationale for first aid provision outside of the hospital between 1941 and 2020 in the United Kingdom. Drawing on 28 historical materials from this timeframe and bringing these into dialog with sociological ideas of professionalisation, jurisdiction, and bounding, I analyse how expertise has been historically situated and transformed from 1941 to 2020. This timeline then parallels the developments and changes of voluntary aid societies/first aid provision to show that both expertise and responsibility are ‘on-the-move’ and are relational. The paper offers conclusions around the relative positioning of expertise, including how different organisations depend on, matter for, and shape one another within an ‘ecology of care’.