Ambulance clinicians encounter different kinds of illness/injury in all different ages and life-situations, requiring their ability to provide a multidimensional care. Being in need of ambulance care is to be vulnerable and exposed in a dramatic life-event, and refers to an existential suffering. The care of this suffering is often described as being based on common sense diminishing the advanced, complex and professional competence this requires. This is not exclusively rooted in a biomedical perspective on the patient’s illness, but in an understanding of an existential wellbeing. Those two perspectives have to be equal in a contemporary ambulance care. The starting point for this has to be the patient’s subjective experience of his/her illness/injury. To develop this the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s theory about explanationand understandingis used. Ricoeur suggests a dialectic differentiation between those concepts, giving them an intimate relationship. Explanationcorresponds to the structural study of an object as a reality in itself, such as a biomedical explanation of the patient’s illness. Understandingon the other hand is to interpret an object as a part of a greater reality and generated by a subjective interpretation, such as understanding the illness from the perspective of the patient’s unique experience. Those concepts have to be intertwined and given equal priority in the ambulance care. Thus, the ambulance clinicians have to both understand and explain the patient and his/her situation, in order to properly assess and provide care based on the patient’s perspective.