§ 25-21,186.Emergency care at scene of emergency; persons relieved of civil liability, when.

Section 25-21,186 is Nebraska’s Good Samaritan protection for emergency care. A person who renders emergency care at the scene of an accident or other emergency, without charge, is not held liable for civil damages resulting from any act or omission in giving that care. The protection also covers a failure to act, or a failure to provide or arrange for medical treatment for the injured person, so the statute reaches both what the rescuer did and did not do at the scene.

The word gratuitously is doing real work here: the immunity belongs to someone who steps in without expecting or receiving payment, not to someone rendering care as part of a paid professional role at the scene. Strip away the compensation element, and the statute’s protection follows a volunteer rescuer through the full range of decisions made in the moment, including whether and how to seek further medical help for the injured person.

The section also addresses a specific, modern scenario: a person who enters a motor vehicle to remove a child, where entering the vehicle and removing the child is necessary to avoid immediate harm to the child, is treated as rendering emergency care at the scene of an accident or other emergency for purposes of this immunity. That extension recognizes that a hot or otherwise dangerous vehicle can itself be the emergency, even without a separate accident triggering it.