For example in Poland you have a duty to help another person and NOT doing so will get you sued by the state, exemption being of course if said help cannot be performed without endangering yourself as non-professional rescuer’s safety always comes first in order to not end up with more dead bodies obviously.
Courts will almost always assume that at one point in life—at school, in boy/girl scouts, when doing your driving license, in myriad of other places—you have gone through basic training and so there’s no defence of not knowing the skills.
Moving someone away from a car is included in emergency help and AFAIK there’s no differentiation of medical and non-medical actions.
Even if someone cannot be rescued and is clearly dying there might be a duty of care to comfort them through last moments of their life until emergency services arrive but in practice that’s not so stringent.
You being in shock turns you into a casualty as well and of course may be an exemption, depending on severity, later medical assessment of you etc. etc.
Fun phrase: translating from Polish civil law, if there is an emergency situation you literally “receive a task/quest from a state” to help and I think (very much check me on it) this is what grants you power to break some other laws while performing help (trespassing etc.)
Source: paraphrasing from pap.pl, Polish Press Agency — also: I’m not a lawyer and take my translation with a grain of salt.
Without a source but from my own empirical experience of being a non-pro rescue unit in scout boys (and saving people from crashes and drownings that occurred during our travels, luckily not to us) I can also add that once you call 112 (EU-wide equivalent of 911) then following prompts from the operator falls under this law as well, and depending on severity they may allow you to stand down completely or remind you of your duty if you’re trying to chicken out of helping altogether even if AED is there.
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Thank you for pointing this one out @michaelkeenan—it is often a case that in the English-speaking part of the Internet people write about the state (and thus law) as if everyone was living in the US. Going online as a diversity loss function for Europeans, that’s going to be a title of my next post ;-)
In many countries it may even be a reverse!
For example in Poland you have a duty to help another person and NOT doing so will get you sued by the state, exemption being of course if said help cannot be performed without endangering yourself as non-professional rescuer’s safety always comes first in order to not end up with more dead bodies obviously.
Courts will almost always assume that at one point in life—at school, in boy/girl scouts, when doing your driving license, in myriad of other places—you have gone through basic training and so there’s no defence of not knowing the skills.
Moving someone away from a car is included in emergency help and AFAIK there’s no differentiation of medical and non-medical actions.
Even if someone cannot be rescued and is clearly dying there might be a duty of care to comfort them through last moments of their life until emergency services arrive but in practice that’s not so stringent.
You being in shock turns you into a casualty as well and of course may be an exemption, depending on severity, later medical assessment of you etc. etc.
Fun phrase: translating from Polish civil law, if there is an emergency situation you literally “receive a task/quest from a state” to help and I think (very much check me on it) this is what grants you power to break some other laws while performing help (trespassing etc.)
Source: paraphrasing from pap.pl, Polish Press Agency — also: I’m not a lawyer and take my translation with a grain of salt.
Without a source but from my own empirical experience of being a non-pro rescue unit in scout boys (and saving people from crashes and drownings that occurred during our travels, luckily not to us) I can also add that once you call 112 (EU-wide equivalent of 911) then following prompts from the operator falls under this law as well, and depending on severity they may allow you to stand down completely or remind you of your duty if you’re trying to chicken out of helping altogether even if AED is there.
—-
Thank you for pointing this one out @michaelkeenan—it is often a case that in the English-speaking part of the Internet people write about the state (and thus law) as if everyone was living in the US. Going online as a diversity loss function for Europeans, that’s going to be a title of my next post ;-)