SST or PSC1: Which First-Aid Course Can Your Organisation Offer?

“Do you run first-aid courses?” Behind that client question actually sit two schemes that only resemble each other from a distance: the SST (sauveteur secouriste du travail, workplace first aider) and the PSC1 (prévention et secours civiques de niveau 1, France’s citizen first-aid unit). For a training organisation, confusing them is doubly risky: commercially, because you answer beside the need; legally, because the permissions to deliver them do not come from the same place. Here is how to position your offer.

Two schemes, two worlds

The SST and the PSC1 share a base of first-aid techniques, but everything else differs:

	SST	PSC1
Universe	Work: the company and its risks	Civic life: the citizen facing an emergency
Governance	Health-insurance occupational-risks network / INRS	Civil protection (Ministry of the Interior)
Who may train	SST-authorised entities (training organisations, companies)	Associations and organisations accredited or authorised for first-aid training
Management tool	FORPREV (sessions and certificates)	Civil protection’s own circuits
Specific content	Rescue techniques + occupational-risk prevention, company setting	Citizen’s first-aid actions and responses
Validity	24-month certificate, 7-hour refresher (MAC) to maintain it	No equivalent workplace maintenance mechanism

The practical consequence is immediate: your SST authorisation does not allow you to deliver the PSC1, and a civil-protection accreditation does not allow you to issue SST certificates. Two offers, two procedures, two networks.

The equivalence that only works one way

French regulation deems the holder of a valid SST certificate to also hold the PSC1 first-aid unit. An employee your organisation trains as an SST is therefore also recognised as a PSC1 holder — an argument worth knowing, for instance for employees whose personal or professional projects require the PSC1.

The reverse does not exist: a PSC1 holder is not an SST. They lack the occupational-risk prevention component and the scheme’s certifying assessments. And the equivalence falls with the certificate: an SST who lets the 24 months pass without a refresher loses both their SST status and the benefit of the equivalence. One more lever for your renewal reminders, whose mechanics we detail in our article on the MAC SST refresher.

For the corporate market, SST is the standard answer

If your clients are employers, SST prevails almost every time. Three reasons:

1. It answers the first-aid obligation. The French labour code (article R. 4224-15) requires a staff member trained in first aid in every workshop where dangerous work is carried out and on every site with at least twenty workers for more than fifteen days where dangerous work is performed. SST is the working world’s historic, fully-tooled answer to that requirement.
2. It builds in prevention. SST does not only teach how to react: it links the accident to workstation risks and their prevention, making it part of the employer’s overall prevention approach.
3. It is maintained. The 24-month certificate + refresher cycle guarantees the employer genuinely operational first aiders — and your organisation a recurring flow.

The underlying stake is not administrative. The study by Hasselqvist-Ax and colleagues published in 2015 in the New England Journal of Medicine, covering more than 30,000 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests in Sweden (see the study), measured a 30-day survival rate more than doubled when bystanders performed CPR before emergency services arrived (10.5% versus 4.0%). Training first aiders who are present on site — exactly what SST does in companies — saves lives: that is the argument that closes most commercial conversations.

Which offer strategy for your organisation?

• Target: companies and public employers → SST first. It is the scheme built for that market, with refresher recurrence as a bonus. The entry point is the authorisation from the health-insurance/INRS network — steps detailed in our guide to obtaining the SST authorisation.
• Target: the general public, associations, settings requiring the PSC1 → the civil-protection circuit. That market has its own accreditations and rules; do not wander into it by improvising from your SST offer.
• Awareness sessions without a certificate (life-saving gestures at a company event, internal workshops): possible without authorisation, provided you are crystal clear that they deliver no SST or PSC1 certificate. Any ambiguity in your communication is a fault — and if the session is publicly or pooled-funded, your obligations as a Qualiopi-certified organisation apply as for any training action (see the framework’s indicators).

The questions to ask a client who wants “some first-aid training”

When the request arrives vaguely worded, four questions are enough to qualify the need — and to avoid selling the wrong scheme:

1. “Who will be trained, and in what setting?” Employees at their workplace → SST. Volunteers, private individuals, an audience outside any professional setting → the PSC1 circuit.
2. “Are you after a certificate, or an awareness session?” If a certificate is expected, only the corresponding scheme can issue it; if it is an awareness session, say so explicitly in the proposal — no certificate will be handed out.
3. “Is there a regulatory or client requirement behind this?” The employer’s first-aid obligation, a customer’s or a tender’s requirement: in the working world, SST is what answers it.
4. “How will the course be funded?” Own funds, or OPCO coverage — in which case your Qualiopi certification enters the equation on top of the authorisation.

Two minutes of qualification on the phone beat an off-target proposal — or, worse, a service you are not entitled to deliver.

Take action

SST for the workplace, PSC1 for civic life: clarify your target, then start the corresponding authorisation procedure. For the corporate market, everything begins with the SST authorisation — our SST authorisation page gathers conditions, FORPREV steps and the complete downloadable guide.