Certification Standards
Who We Are
The Wilderness Medicine Education Collaborative (WMEC) is a professional organization formed in 2010 to provide a forum for discussing trends and issues in wilderness medicine and to develop consensus-driven scope of practice documents and de facto standards for Wilderness First Aid (WFA), Wilderness Advanced First Aid (WAFA), and Wilderness First Responder (WFR) certifications. In 2022, the WMEC expanded its work to include related white papers and position statements. Our mission is to elevate wilderness medicine education and set standards for common field certifications.

All WMEC documents are available for download from this website. Wilderness medicine schools that teach to the WMEC certification standards may stipulate so on their websites and marketing materials.

The WMEC and its member schools are not responsible for the use or misuse of the standards documents, white papers, or position papers on this website. Nor do we monitor, regulate or endorse any specific wilderness medicine school.
​Our mission is to elevate wilderness medicine education
and set standards for common field certifications. 
Practical and Realistic Content
Traditional first-aid programs do not meet the needs of people who live, work, travel, and recreate in the outdoors. Recreationalists, guides, and trip leaders care for patients in remote locations, in challenging weather, with questionable communication and support, limited equipment, and may need to make independent patient care and transport decisions. As a result, they need specialized training. The WMEC schools have over two hundred years of collective experience teaching wilderness medicine and have trained over 750,000 students in the past four decades. The content of our standards documents, white papers, and position papers is based on evidence and our experience; as such, they are practical and realistic.