St John Ambulance. Serving humanity
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St John Ambulance Australia is a community organisation specialising in first aid training and delivery. Although the organisation is part of a world-wide association, St John Ambulance Australia is proudly independent and robustly Australian.
Widely known as ‘St John’ among its members, this prominent charitable institution has been active in Australia since 1883, when the first St John centre was established in Melbourne. Over the next ten years, similar centres were established in all other Australian capital cities and many regional cities also.
St John Ambulance is active in about 50 nations around the world, mostly in countries belonging to the Commonwealth of Nations, reflecting St John’s British origins. St John Ambulance is an outgrowth and part of the Most Venerable Order of St John, a British royal order of chivalry founded in 1831.
The Order established St John Ambulance in England during the 1870s to meet a public need for simple, safe first aid procedures that lay people could follow in treating injuries. The St John Ambulance first aid training course equipped ordinary lay people to treat the injuries confronting them in workplaces, homes and public places. The course was an instant success. Within several years the St John course was being taught to tens of thousands of people in cities around the world.
First Aid to the Injured, the pocket-sized St John training manual first published in 1878, was another runaway success. A ready reference work issued to people enrolling in the first aid classes, over the succeeding decades it sold countless millions of copies.
In Australia, St John is still the major provider of first aid training programs. Proud of its slogan ‘First in First Aid’, the organisation annually trains some 600,000 Australians in first aid. The St John training manual, Australian First Aid, is Australia’s premier first aid reference book; and St John first aid kits are ready and waiting for use in workplaces, homes and cars across Australia.
In Western Australia and the Northern Territory, St John is responsible for conducting the state-wide ambulance transport services.
In 1887 St John established the St John Ambulance Brigade, a uniformed, voluntary organisation of trained first aiders who grouped together to provide a public first aid service wherever crowds gathered – sporting events, concerts, street parades and festivals. They were easily identified by their black-and-white uniforms with Maltese cross shoulder flashes.
In Australia, the Brigade is now called the St John Event Health Services. On duty, the uniformed first aid volunteers nowadays wear ‘ambulance green’ jumpsuits but they’re still recognised by their Maltese cross shoulder flashes.
St John Event Health Services has 11,000 members across Australia. All volunteers, but trained to high standards of competency, they perform some five million hours of public duty annually – at major sporting events, Royal Shows, fun runs, rock concerts, ANZAC Day parades and at disasters like the ‘Black Saturday’ bushfires in Victoria.
Another St John endeavour is the St John Jerusalem Eye Hospital Group, which the Order founded in 1884. The Eye Hospital maintains satellite treatment centres in Gaza and the West Bank towns. St John Ambulance Australia contributes substantially to the training of eye specialists and nursing staff at the hospital.
All of these endeavours give practical expression to the charitable St John ethos, encapsulated in the Order’s ancient Latin motto, Pro utilitate hominum – ‘for the service of humanity’.
Menchie Khairuddin is a writer Deputy Content Manager at Akolade and content producer for Third Sector News. She is passionate about social affairs specifically in mixed, multicultural heritage and not-for-profit organisations.
