The first minutes of a dive or boat emergency.
First Minutes is a free, offline app for the people who are actually there — call, oxygen on, say the words, write it down.
It opens in your browser and installs to the home screen from there. Once it has opened once, it works with no signal.
What it does
- Two numbers, already right for where you are. Before the first paint, the phone's own clock names the country, and the two tiles become that country's checked ambulance number and the DAN hotline DAN publishes for it — fifty countries. The line underneath says which country and the date the numbers were checked. Never a number without that line.
- Four cards, and nothing else. CPR, Diving injuries, Call script, Analysis. A menu across the bottom of every screen so nothing is more than one tap away.
- A call script to read aloud. Two versions — one for a diver, one for anyone else — with the GPS position, its accuracy and the time in the part the operator asks for first. Words filled in from your details are marked, so you check each one against what is in front of you. At the end you read back what you were told to do, and it is stamped into the notes.
- Notes with the time on them. What you saw and when, including every tap on a phone number, for the people who take over.
- A printable emergency action plan for a dive centre. One page, black on white, with a QR square. A diver scans the square with the phone camera and the plan becomes their current trip — offline from that moment. No server sees it; the plan is inside the code itself.
The GPS is asked for only after the numbers are already on screen, so the permission sheet can never appear over an empty page.
Who it is for
The person standing next to the casualty. The buddy, the deckhand, the spouse, the divemaster — not the doctor on the phone.
It is not an alternative to DAN, to an insurer, to a hotline or to a physician. It is what happens in the minutes before those take over: the hotline decides the destination, and this gets you to the hotline in good order. It is not a replacement for hands-on first aid and oxygen-provider training either.
What it will never do
These are red lines, not preferences. Most of them are checked mechanically — a build script reads the source before every release and fails the build if one is crossed.
- No diagnosis, and no wording anywhere that says diagnose, triage or assess.
- No score, no severity, no risk figure — nothing computed about a casualty, ever.
- No combining of signs. The A–Z is a book index, not a differential engine.
- No language model anywhere in the crisis path. Cards, plain word search, big buttons.
- No dose or gas calculations, and no medication recommendation of any kind.
- Nothing rendered in front of the phone numbers. No modal, no consent wall, no interstitial.
- No number without its source and the date it was checked — including the cached copy.
- No chamber number that a person has not dialled. An unverified number is absent, not flagged.
- Nothing you type leaves the phone.
- No account, no analytics, no advertising.
First Minutes is not a medical device. It reproduces published first-aid guidance with its source on every step. In an emergency, call first.
Get it
There are no store badges here on purpose: an app that is not listed should not look like one that is.
For dive centres
Fill in your centre's emergency action plan once, print it, and put it on the wall and in the first-aid kit. It is one generic plan for the centre — not one per boat. It carries your ambulance number and dive-doctor line with the page and date each was checked against, your own call-back number, the hospital and the chamber if you have phoned them, the oxygen you keep, and your evacuation route leg by leg. The QR on it loads the whole plan into a diver's phone from the camera, with no signal and no server.
Numbers and sources
Diving emergency hotline numbers are shown as published by Divers Alert Network (DAN), checked 6 September 2026. Numbers that could not be checked are not listed at all. DAN is not affiliated with this app and has not reviewed it. DAN's own pages and tools are linked from inside the app, never copied.
National ambulance numbers are checked one by one against the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office travel-advice page for that country, and each carries the page it was checked against and the date.
Every first-aid step in the app shows the published source it came from, with the year. Steps that have not been through their citation pass say so on their own card.
The app is free and carries no advertising. One page inside it, under "before the trip" and unreachable from any emergency screen, links to two dive insurers; one of those links earns the author a referral, which is disclosed on that page. Nothing is sold inside the app and no commercial link appears anywhere near the phone numbers.
Privacy
There is no account, no login and no analytics. Nothing you type is transmitted: no server sees your notes, your details or the dive centre plan you build here. It all stays in the browser on the device, and the app keeps working with no signal at all.
If you allow it, the phone's GPS is read on the phone, to name the nearest town and to show you your position so you can read it to the operator. The position is never sent anywhere. Place names and coordinates come from GeoNames, used under CC BY 4.0 and modified: filtered to selected towns, coordinates rounded to three decimals.
This website sets no cookies, loads nothing from anywhere else, and counts no visits.
Contact and support
Questions, corrections, and a number that has changed: donarundas.work@gmail.com
First Minutes is made by Donarun Das, a technical diving instructor.