Background: Prehospital emergency care provides care for patients of all ages and life situations and with a variety of suffering, diseases and injuries. Different caring aspects are required in order to respond to the patients’ needs, in parallel with medical assessment and treatment. In order to manage care in these unpredictable and complex contexts, the contextual caring science perspective needs to be developed. 

Aim: To develop a middle-range theory aimed at prehospital emergency care within a caring science framework. 

Method: A deductive and inductive design was used to generate understanding of the central concepts; the suffering human being, the caring relationship and the caring environment within prehospital emergency care. 

Result: The STOP theory comprises the concepts; acute suffering (S), act of togetherness (T), on-scene caring space (O) within in the contextual framework of prehospital emergency care (P). Acute suffering affects us without a clear warning, becoming acute. It means recognizing and accepting that one’s own resources are insufficient and completely exhausted. The ambulance clinician and the patient are in an act of togetherness from different positions and understandings, being dependent on each other to create conditions for continued care. This represents for patients an alteration from being in an involuntary and lonely struggle, to be cared for in a shared struggle to alleviate suffering. The on-scene caring space in which the clinician and the patient are situated are both a prerequisite for care and caring in itself. The space is not static but constantly changing and thus dynamic and elusive. 

Conclusion and implications: The STOP theory is important for clinical care, education and research in the prehospital emergency care setting as the theory is developed with an understanding of suffering as a wider phenomenon than the narrower biomedical perspective.