The development of the Swedish ambulance service has resulted in three different competence levels in Swedish ambulance teams: specialist ambulance nurses, registered nurses and emergency medical technicians. A nursing scientific model developed by Peplau (Peplau, H., 1991. Interpersonal Relations in Nursing. Springer Publishing Company, New York.) breaks down the nurse-patient relationship into a number of phases: an orientation, an identification, an exploitation and a resolution phase. This model has then been adapted to the pre-hospital emergency care by Suserud (Dahlberg, K., Segesten, K., Nyström, M., Suserud, B.-O., Fagerberg, I., 2003. Att förstå vårdvetenskap [To Understand Caring Science]. Studentlitteratur, Lund.). The purpose of this study was to explore, by direct content analysis, how the phases of the pre-hospital nurse-patient relationship described by Suserud (Dahlberg et al., 2003), emerge in 17 specialist ambulance nursing students descriptions of ambulance missions. The results show that the four phases of the pre-hospital nurse-patient relationship could be identified and each phase includes several different parts. Furthermore, the results show that the parts of each phase can vary depending on the patient's condition and the environmental circumstances of the ambulance mission. This improved understanding of the four phases of the pre-hospital nurse-patient relationship, and their parts, could be used by ambulance team members as a support during the pre-hospital caring process in ambulance missions. This new knowledge could also be used in education. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd.