Every first aid emergency starts the same way: someone who urgently needs help, and someone standing nearby whose brain has just gone completely blank. That blank is not a character flaw — it is what adrenaline does to a person who has no plan. DRSABCD is the plan. Seven letters, in a fixed order, that take the panic and give it a job. You don’t have to diagnose anything. You just work down the letters.

It sits underneath every ANZCOR-based first aid course in the country, which is why it turns up in your assessment, on the wall of the workplace first aid room, and on the back of roughly every CPR chart in Australia. This guide walks each step in order and links out to the deeper ones where you need them — the recovery position, controlling serious bleeding, the mistakes first aiders make during CPR and finding the nearest defibrillator — so you can go as deep as you like on any single letter.

What does DRSABCD stand for?

DRSABCD stands for Danger, Response, Send for help, Airway, Breathing, CPR, Defibrillation. It is the basic life support action plan used across Australia and New Zealand, and it maps directly onto the ANZCOR Basic Life Support flowchart.

• D — Danger. Check for hazards to you, to bystanders, then to the casualty.
• R — Response. Talk and touch. Are they conscious?
• S — Send for help. Call Triple Zero (000).
• A — Airway. Open it, and clear it if you need to.
• B — Breathing. Look, listen and feel. Is it normal?
• C — CPR. 30 compressions to 2 breaths, for every age.
• D — Defibrillation. Attach an AED as soon as one arrives and follow its prompts.

The order is not decoration. Each letter earns its place by being the thing most likely to kill the person if you skip it. An open airway is worthless if you got electrocuted reaching the casualty, which is why Danger comes first. Compressions are worthless if nobody has called an ambulance, which is why Send sits ahead of them. Learn the sequence and you have essentially pre-decided every difficult call before the adrenaline arrives.

Step 1 — Danger

Before you take a single step toward the person, take about ten seconds to look at everything that isn’t the person. Traffic. Live wires. A running quad bike. Water. Broken glass. An unsecured load. Whatever it was that hurt them is often still there, entirely willing to hurt you as well.

The order within Danger is deliberate too: you first, bystanders second, casualty third. That feels backwards and even slightly callous the first time you hear it. It isn’t. A rescuer who becomes a second casualty doubles the workload and halves the chance anyone gets helped. On a farm outside Taree that means switching off the machine and taking the key. On the highway it means hazard lights and space. At a Port Macquarie building site it means confirming the power is isolated before you touch anyone lying near a tool.

If you can remove the danger, remove it. If you can’t, move the casualty — but only if leaving them there is genuinely more dangerous than moving them.

Step 2 — Response

Now you find out whether you are dealing with an unconscious person or someone who’s had a fright. Kneel beside them, and use both talk and touch. Say their name if you know it. Ask a question that requires an actual answer. Squeeze their shoulders firmly — not a polite tap, a proper squeeze.

Three broad outcomes. They respond normally: make them comfortable, look for injuries, and keep monitoring. They respond in a groggy, confused, half-there way: treat that as serious and get help moving. They don’t respond at all: you have an unconscious person and you go straight to the next letter.

The COWS check

Most Australian courses teach a quick memory hook for the talk-and-touch part — COWS:

• Can you hear me?
• Open your eyes.
• What’s your name?
• Squeeze my hands.

It gives you four escalating prompts in about eight seconds, and the last one is the useful one: a person who can squeeze your hands on command has a working brain and a working airway. If you also have time to gather a bit of history from a conscious casualty, the SAMPLE acronym is the tool for that, and paramedics will thank you for it.

Step 3 — Send for help

Call Triple Zero (000). Not in a minute, not after you’ve had a look — now.

If someone else is there, don’t announce it to the room. Point at one person, describe them (“blue shirt, glasses”), and give them one job: “Call 000 and come back and tell me what they said.” Diffused responsibility is a real and well-documented phenomenon, and it is the reason bystanders hesitate in a crowd. A named instruction cuts straight through it.

If you’re alone, put the phone on speaker and set it down beside you. You can do compressions and talk at the same time. The call-taker will coach you, and — this matters — will tell you where the closest registered defibrillator is.

What to say when they answer

They will ask whether you need police, fire or ambulance, then where you are. Give the address including the street name and number. If you are unsure of your location and are calling on a mobile phone, use a mapping application like Google Maps or Apple Maps to confirm your location. Then: how many people, what’s happened, whether they’re conscious, whether they’re breathing. Stay on the line until you’re told to hang up.

Step 4 — Airway

An unconscious person has one immediate enemy, and it is their own anatomy. Muscle tone disappears, the tongue slumps back, and the airway closes.

Roll them onto their side if there’s anything in the mouth — fluid, vomit, blood, a loose denture — and clear it with your fingers. Then open the airway: for an adult or child, one hand on the forehead, the fingertips of the other under the bony part of the chin, and tilt the head gently back. For an infant under one, keep the head in a neutral position — no tilt at all — because an infant’s airway kinks shut if you overextend it.

A common worry: what about a suspected spinal injury? ANZCOR’s guidance is unambiguous — care of the airway takes precedence over any injury, including a possible spinal one. Handle them gently, avoid twisting, but open that airway.

Step 5 — Breathing

Put your cheek near their mouth, look along the chest, and take up to ten seconds. Look for chest movement. Listen for air. Feel it on your skin.

The word doing all the work here is normally. In the first minutes of a cardiac arrest, a lot of people make slow, irregular, snoring or gasping noises. It’s called agonal breathing, and it is the single most common reason bystanders stand there watching someone die: it looks like breathing, so they wait. It is not breathing. It is a dying brainstem’s last reflex.

If it isn’t calm, regular and effortless, treat it as not breathing and start CPR. If they are breathing normally but are unconscious, roll them into the recovery position and keep watching them, because that can change in a heartbeat.

Step 6 — CPR

Thirty compressions, two breaths, repeat. For every age, from newborn to ninety.

Heel of your hand on the lower half of the breastbone, other hand on top, fingers interlocked. Shoulders directly above your hands, arms locked straight, and push with your body weight rather than your arms — you will be here a while. Push about a third of the depth of the chest, at 100 to 120 compressions per minute, and let the chest come all the way back up between each one. That recoil is what lets the heart refill; leaning on the chest is one of the most common mistakes we see.

Two breaths after every thirty: head tilted, chin lifted, nose pinched, a one-second breath that makes the chest visibly rise. If you can’t or won’t do rescue breaths, do continuous compressions — hands-only CPR keeps the blood moving and is enormously better than the alternative, which is nothing.

If there are two of you, swap the compressor roughly every two minutes. Not because it’s polite. Because compression quality falls off a cliff after about two minutes and the person doing it is always the last to notice.

Step 7 — Defibrillation

Get an AED on the chest as fast as humanly possible, and don’t stop compressions while someone fetches it.

Modern defibrillators talk you through it. Turn it on, bare and dry the chest — yes, the shirt and the bra have to come off, because pads need skin — stick the pads where the diagram shows, and do exactly what the voice says. It will analyse the rhythm and it will not shock a heart that doesn’t need shocking. You cannot accidentally hurt someone with one.

Every minute without defibrillation costs roughly ten per cent of a person’s survival chance. That is the entire argument for knowing where the nearest AED lives before you ever need it — the surf club, the servo, the school, the gym.

DRSABCD for children and infants — what changes

The letters don’t change. The technique does, and only in a few places.

That last row is the one people get stuck on. If the only pads you have are adult pads, use them — place one on the chest and one on the back so they can’t touch each other. A shock with the wrong pads beats no shock at all, every time.

Why the order matters more on the Mid North Coast

Here is the uncomfortable arithmetic of living somewhere beautiful. Brain damage from a cardiac arrest starts at around four minutes. An ambulance responding to Bonny Hills, Comboyne, Lansdowne or a property out past Wingham is not arriving in four minutes, and everyone involved knows it. NSW Ambulance crews on the Mid North Coast cover enormous distances between towns.

Which means that on the Mid North Coast, bystander CPR isn’t a helpful extra while you wait for the professionals. It is the treatment. The paramedics arrive to continue something you started — or they arrive to something that stopped ten minutes ago. That gap is exactly why a netball coach at Taree, a supervisor on a Kempsey worksite or an educator at a Port Macquarie early learning centre being able to run DRSABCD without thinking is worth so much more out here than it is in the middle of a capital city.

Where DRSABCD stops and judgement starts

A fair question: do you really run all seven letters every single time? No — you run them in order, and most of the time you stop early because you’ve found your answer. Someone who responds to your voice has, by definition, an airway and breathing, so you’re not tilting anyone’s head back. The plan isn’t a script you must complete. It’s a filter that stops you skipping something that kills people.

The other thing worth saying out loud: DRSABCD is a memory aid, not a skill. Knowing that C stands for CPR and being able to deliver effective compressions on a real chest at 2am are two very different things, and only one of them saves anyone.

Learn it with your hands, not just your head

You can read this page three times and still freeze. Almost everyone does the first time, because reading about compressions and feeling a chest give under your palms have almost nothing in common. What closes that gap is practice — running the sequence out loud, with your hands on a manikin, until the order stops being something you recall and starts being something you simply do.

That’s what our nationally recognised training is built around. Whether you’re doing a first aid course in Port Macquarie, a first aid course in Taree or training at Forster-Tuncurry, you’ll work through DRSABCD on adult, child and infant manikins with a trainer correcting your hand position in real time — which is the only way anyone has ever actually learned this. If you’re organising a crew, a club or a centre, we also run workplace and group training on site; just get in touch and we’ll sort the logistics.

Have a look at the upcoming course dates and enrol in a course today. The letters take five minutes to memorise. The confidence takes a day.

Frequently asked questions

What does DRSABCD stand for?

DRSABCD stands for Danger, Response, Send for help, Airway, Breathing, CPR and Defibrillation. It is the basic life support action plan taught in Australian first aid courses and set out in the ANZCOR Basic Life Support flowchart, and it gives you a fixed order to work through in any emergency where someone is seriously unwell or unresponsive.

Is it DRABC or DRSABCD?

DRSABCD. The older DRABC sequence was expanded to add S for Send for help — making the emergency call an explicit, non-negotiable step rather than something assumed — and D for Defibrillation, reflecting how common and how effective public access defibrillators have become. If you learned DRABC years ago, your certificate has almost certainly expired anyway.

What’s the difference between DRSABCD and CPR?

DRSABCD is the whole action plan; CPR is one step inside it. CPR is the letter C, and you only reach it if you’ve checked for danger, found no response, sent for help, opened the airway and confirmed the person isn’t breathing normally. Starting compressions on someone who is breathing is a real risk when people skip straight to the part they remember.

Do you have to do DRSABCD in order every time?

Yes, you work through it in order — but you stop as soon as the situation gives you an answer. If the person responds when you talk to them, you don’t continue on to airway and breathing checks. The order matters because each letter protects against a specific way things go wrong, and skipping one is how a rescuer ends up injured or an ambulance ends up called far too late.

What is the “S” in DRSABCD?

The S stands for Send for help — calling Triple Zero (000). It sits third, before you even open the airway, because an ambulance takes time to arrive and that clock should start as early as possible. If you’re on your own, put the call on speaker so you can keep your hands free for CPR while the call-taker coaches you.