What ARC is, and why a first aider should care
The Australian Resuscitation Council (ARC) is the peak clinical body that decides what good resuscitation and first aid look like in Australia and New Zealand. It is a not-for-profit medical body whose membership includes the Australian Medical Association, the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, the College of Anaesthetists, the College of Emergency Medicine, the College of Intensive Care Medicine, the Australian College of Paramedicine, the Heart Foundation, St John Ambulance, and most of the state ambulance services. Together with the New Zealand Resuscitation Council they form ANZCOR — the Australian and New Zealand Committee on Resuscitation — which is the body whose name appears on every guideline in this course. G2
The reason this matters to a first aider is simple: there is no single "first aid" — there is the Australian first aid that ANZCOR recommends, which is what hospitals, ambulances, RTOs, courts, and workplaces all expect you to follow. When somebody asks why you treated a snake bite with pressure-immobilisation rather than a tourniquet, "because the ANZCOR guideline says so" is the right answer. When a coroner asks why you applied 30 chest compressions and not 15, the same answer applies.
§ Instructor's note
Learners often arrive having absorbed a mishmash of first-aid folklore from American TV shows, parents, school camps, sports clubs and the internet. Some of it is right, much of it is out of date, and a bit of it is actively dangerous (the Heimlich manoeuvre, sucking snake bites, butter on burns). The single most useful thing this chapter does is give them a way to tell which is which: if it's in an ANZCOR guideline, it's current Australian practice; if it isn't, it isn't.
Where the guidelines live
ANZCOR guidelines are published free at anzcor.org. Anyone can read them, anyone can download them, and they are updated as the underlying clinical evidence changes. There are about 35 guidelines in the current set, grouped into sections:
- Section 1 — basic life support principles
- Section 2–7 — adult resuscitation, defibrillation, airway, ventilation
- Section 8 — CPR
- Section 9 — first aid (this is the one most of this course draws from)
- Section 10–14 — neonatal, paediatric, advanced life support, education
The Section 9 guidelines are the ones a first aider lives in. Each one carries a number-and-letter ID like G9-1-1 (bleeding), G9-2-7 (anaphylaxis), G9-3-2 (drowning). When a chapter on this site cites G9-2-5, it is pointing at the specific ANZCOR document that authorises the action being described — you can read the source yourself in five minutes.
How the guidelines get made
ANZCOR doesn't invent the guidelines from scratch. Every five years the International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (ILCOR) runs a global evidence review — pooling research from Europe, the Americas, Asia and Australasia — and publishes a Consensus on Science with Treatment Recommendations. ANZCOR takes those recommendations, adapts them to Australian and New Zealand conditions (including our particular mix of envenomations, drowning environments, and ambulance response times), and publishes the local guidelines.
Between full ILCOR reviews, ANZCOR can update individual guidelines if new evidence demands it — the tourniquet guidance, for example, shifted in the early 2020s after evidence from military and trauma research became overwhelming.
What the guidelines are not
Two things to be clear about:
- They are not law. ANZCOR guidelines are clinical recommendations, not legislation. But they are the recognised standard of care in Australia, and a first aider who departs from them without good reason is on weak ground in a coroner's court.
- They are not a recipe. A guideline tells you what to do in the typical case. Real casualties are messy, scenes are dangerous, and judgement is part of the job. The guideline gives you a defensible default — your assessment of the actual situation in front of you can override it, and the guideline itself often says so.
ANZCOR guidelines are revised on a roughly five-year cycle. A first-aid certificate from 2018 was based on the 2016 guideline set; a 2026 certificate is based on the 2021 set. This is one of the main reasons CPR and first-aid certificates expire — see the currency requirements chapter. If you are still teaching what you learned in the 1990s, some of it is wrong now.
Why a single shared standard matters
When the casualty in your office collapses and you start CPR, then a passer-by steps in to help, then a workplace first-aid responder takes over, then the paramedics arrive, then the emergency department takes the handover — every one of those people learned the same numbers (30 compressions to 2 breaths, 5 to 6 cm depth, 100–120 per minute) from the same source. That shared protocol is what lets resuscitation handovers actually work. The reason ANZCOR exists, in the end, is to make it possible for five strangers to run one resuscitation.
You will not be examined on the names of ARC committees. You will be expected to know that ANZCOR guidelines are the source of every protocol in the course, that they are free and public at anzcor.org, that they are updated every few years, and that "what does the guideline say?" is a sensible question to ask whenever you are unsure.
The first aider's job is not to invent good practice from first principles. It is to know where good practice has already been written down — and to follow it.
— ANZCOR Guideline 2 (introduction to first aid)