Background and purpose:

  Pre-hospital care as a concept is subjective, multidimensional, and ambiguous and associated with health care system. Around whole world has been focused on the importance of burn victims. But pre-hospital emergency care is still an abstract concept. The purpose of the present study was to analyze the concept of care in the context of pre-hospital emergency.

  Materials & methods:

  This study employed the hybrid model to define the concept of pre-hospital care through three phases. For the theoretical phase, review related literature databases until 2012. Papers were analyzed and evaluated. In the field work stage, semi-structured interviews were conducted with eighteen people including nurses working in emergency burn care and burn specialist, emergency personnel, burn victims and their relatives. Digital recordings were extracted and written on the paper. Then qualitative content analysis was performed on them. In the final step, two previous stages were combined and the overall analysis was performed.

  Results: In this study six major themes emerged for pre-hospital care included first contact care, assessing patients' needs, sense of security, evidence-based, coordination and vehicle.

  Conclusion: The results of this study will help clarify the concept of pre-hospital emergency care. This clarification can lead to offer comprehensive medical services based on patient needs and lead to the development of nursing profession. Also identification of facilitators, barriers and the concept of pre-hospital emergency care will help the nursing administrators and educators to be able to design managerial and educational activities based on scientific findings, to execute the necessary conditions for learning and implementing high quality pre-hospital emergency care in nursing .