Prehospital emergency care is the response to a patient’s life-threatening and critical medical condition out of hospital. Patients experience this as both existential and physical suffering. There is therefore a need to combine medical care and treatment with a caring science approach in order to provide lifeworld-led nursing care. A model for the application of lifeworld-led prehospital emergency nursing care was developed using Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy, bringing together the concepts understanding and explanation. The model comprises the phases of primary understanding, structural explanation, and secondary understanding, which together integrate medical care with a lifeworld perspective on the patient’s illness or injury.