CorePass® Wilderness First Aid

Based on international best practice, IPSQA’s Wilderness First Aid certification arms responders working in remote and isolated environments with life saving skills.

IPSQA has come to the rescue of wilderness first aid! We aim to have a higher quality of internationally recognised certification whilst reducing the compliance burden on providers so they can make training fun and fit for purpose.

We have constantly heard from providers who are exhausted from “box ticking” and “form fatigue”, frustrated that these requirements were not adding any value to their candidate’s learning experience. Now, IPSQA offers a certification solution that focuses on quality, not compliance with easy to administer self-populating documentation and internal quality assurance that is periodically externally audited. Our Accredited Testing Centres can offer summative assessment against our range of IPSQA CorePass® first aid certification products, from basic to advanced levels often without needing to change their training materials. In particular, this allows military first aid programmes to easily offer concurrent civilian certification that can also be assessed under our National Security Protocol to protect the identity of special operators.

CorePass® First Aid can be used in a range of ways such as:

Integrated into training courses
Used as a stand alone assessment
Used in conjunction with national accreditation (where the ATC is approved as such)

The difference with IPSQA’s CorePass® First Aid series, is that we focus on the quality of the assessor, who often is the instructor.

Assessors for this CorePass® series are required to also meet certification requirements as first aid and/or resuscitation instructors, to ensure our certification meets best practice.

Our certification also allows the candidates’ name to be presented in over 7,000 languages using Unicode text that supports scripts such as Arabic (as example below), Latin, Cyrillic, Han and Devanagari.

Product Overview

PSQA has a wide range of outdoor first aid certification products to meet customer requirements:

CorePass® Wilderness First Aid I

Provides foundational skills to respond to life-threatening emergencies and injuries in remote settings, including CPR, bleeding control, and basic care until help arrives. This level is aligned to the 8-hour AAOS Wilderness First Aid course.

CorePass® Wilderness First Aid II

Builds on core skills to manage more complex injuries, perform thorough assessments, address medical and environmental emergencies, and plan safe evacuations in challenging outdoor environments. This level is aligned to the 16-hour AAOS Wilderness First Aid course.

CorePass® Wilderness First Aid III

Provides advanced certification for complex trauma and medical conditions, emphasizing multisystem assessment, intricate rescue scenarios, and extended patient care in austere and high-risk settings. This level is aligned to the 32-hour AAOS Wilderness First Aid course.

We also have a range of traditional first aid certifications and advanced certification options for pre-hospital emergency care.

Annual Skill Checks

Annual CPR skill checks are widely recommended by resuscitation councils and workplace safety authorities in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. With IPSQA’s supplementary Orange Card system, Accredited Testing Centres can record such checks (refreshers) to the candidates consolidated Global Transcript. This allows rapid verification of currency through the candidates unique QR code.

Continuing Professional Development

Many occupational health and safety regulators require that first aid training is tailored to the specific risks present in each workplace. As a result, standard training often needs to be supplemented with site- or role-specific continuing professional development (CPD) to address particular hazards and operational requirements.

IPSQA’s CPDPass offers an effective solution for capturing this specialist training as CPD. When such professional development is design, delivered, and quality-assured by an Accredited Testing Centre, CPDPass records these achievements, ensuring they are formally recognised on the candidate’s Global Transcript.

This approach provides Accredited Testing Centres with the autonomy to design and deliver CPD that meets the unique needs of their clients. At the same time, these centres remain responsible for the quality and relevance of the professional development they provide. By enabling the recording of site- and function-specific CPD, IPSQA’s CPDPass supports both regulatory compliance and the ongoing professional growth of candidates, offering a complete and verifiable record of their specialist CPD and achievements.

A global transcript

A key innovation of IPSQA is our Global Transcript. A single, consolidated and verifiable digital record of candidates certifications, checks, PPE fit tests, continuing professional development achieved through any of our international network of Accredited Testing Centres.

Assessors with Real World Experience

A key difference with IPSQA first aid assessors is that they all have real world experience providing emergency medical care, whether it be from miliary service, front line ambulance, urgent medical care centres or hospital emergency departments. For vocational first aid standards used in New Zealand and Australia for example, anyone who completes a number of short courses can become a first aid instructor/assessor. Sustained and authentic experience in emergency medical care is non-negotiable as part of IPSQA assessor requirements, ensuring the credibility of our assessment system.

Under our Additional Assessor Requirements (AAR), IPSQA Assessors must hold:

IPSQA Assessor Course (Assessing candidates in accordance with ISO17024:2012)
A minimum of a Pre-Hospital Emergency Care qualification
A minimum of 200 hours clinical experience in emergency medical and trauma care (under audit/medical authority conditions)
And maintain currency through continuing professional development or maintaining registration or authority to practice.

Implementation is easy

Providing you have suitable resources and designated assessors, implementation is easy. Our IPSQA Assessor and ATC Administrator courses are just 8 and 1 hour respectively. In most cases existing training packages from third party suppliers can be used, providing they cover the assessment requirements outlined in the respective CorePass® first aid certification product. For example, the American Academy of Orthapaedic Surgeons (AAOS) Wildernes First Aid course assessments, meet the requirements for the respective CorePass® Wilderness First Aid Certification. ATC’s can purchase the full training package including assessments from Public Safety Group (Jones and Bartlett Publishing) directly. Other approved resources are outlined to help make implementation simple.

We also provide an external moderation service if you want IPSQA to check your existing assessment tool against the syllabus if you do not want to undertake this task yourself (fees apply).

Recognition of Current Competency: Approval Notices

Accredited Testing Centres are authorised to undertake Recognition of Current Competency (RCC) for CorePass® products including the first aid series.

Centres may undertake their own mapping of evidence as part Recognition of Current Competency, or they may use a pre-approved process as prescribed in an IPSQA RCC Approval Notice.

Product Comparison

Our CorePass® scheme is different from our other certifications (such as CertPubS®, ProQual, WorkQual etc), as it does not use the ISO17024:2012 standard. This means the assessor can also be the candidate’s instructor and a lighter level of quality assurance applies. Assessment is still robust with the Accredited Testing Provider still required to ensure assessment tools used are compliant and that evidence is retained for external audit and moderation.

For candidates seeking certification for related topics, IPSQA offers a range of other certification products including: