Purpose: Approximately 10 000 people in Sweden suffer from sudden cardiac arrest outside the hospital each year. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is started in about half of the cases. Treatment of patients with cardiac arrest in a pre-hospital context is complex and focus is placed first and foremost on the patient because of the acute and life-threatening condition. For relatives, it is a traumatic and upsetting experience to be present when a family member suffers from cardiac arrest. The purpose of this study was therefore to describe family members experiences of an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) situation and how the ambulance staff cared for them.

Methods: This pilot study had a qualitative design, based on six individual interviews with family members who were present when the patient suffered OHCA. The interviews were conducted with an initial open-ended question and follow-up questions based on the responses. The data were analysed by qualitative content analysis with an inductive approach. The analysis generated subcategories, which were clustered into seven main categories.

Results: The result describes the informants’ situation management, responsibility handover and their hope and hopelessness in the situation. The result also describes the staff’s care of family members by the categories closeness and distance, confirmation and exclusion, caring relationship and answered and unanswered questions. Family members described the OHCA situation as traumatic with feelings of panic, uncertainty, unreality, but also calm and rationality. Contentedness and gratitude for the ambulance staffs caring approach emerged. However, family members sometimes were not allowed to decide if they wanted to witness the resuscitation attempts or not, and a lack of information led to unnecessary frustration.

Conclusions: Family members often have a need to talk to someone about their experiences of the OHCA situation, express their views on the care that was provided and receive feedback afterwards. Further research on family members’ situation at OHCAs is of great importance for the development of ambulance staff’s skills in caring approaches.