Delivery of Emergency Medical Services in Disasters

Prior to the last decade, there was very little involvement by federal, state and local governmental agencies as regulators or providers of emergency medical care on a day-to-day basis and even less interest in developing and improving plans to provide emergency medical services (EMS) in disaster contexts. However, a change began in 1966 with the National Academy of Sciences report, Accidental Death and Disability: The Neglected Disease of Modern Society and the passage of the Highway Safety Act. These events, together with a Presidential decision to put health care dollars into fighting heart disease and strokes, spurred the passage in 1973 of the Emergency Medical System Act. By promoting and funding the development of comprehensive coordinated regional systems, the EMS Act offered a design to organize a community’s health facilities and resources into a system aimed at insuring that essential emergency health services would be available to all persons in the system’s service area that unnecessary duplication would be avoided.National Center for Health Service Research, Health Resources Administration, Department of Health, Education and Welfar