Emergency medical services: ambulance transportation.

Existing law establishes the Emergency Medical Services Authority, and requires it to adopt regulations that further the purpose of establishing a statewide system for emergency medical services. Existing law, the Emergency Medical Services System and the Prehospital Emergency Medical Care Personnel Act, authorizes each county to develop an emergency medical services program. The act further authorizes a local emergency medical services (EMS) agency to develop and submit a plan to the Emergency Medical Services Authority for an emergency medical services system, and requires the local EMS agency, using state minimum standards, to establish policies and procedures to assure medical control of the emergency medical services system that may require basic life support emergency medical transportation services to meet any medical control requirements, including dispatch, patient destination policies, patient care guidelines, and quality assurance requirements. This bill would authorize a local EMS agency to adopt policies and procedures relating to ambulance patient offload time, as defined. The bill would require the authority to develop a statewide standard methodology for the calculation and reporting by a local EMS agency of ambulance patient offload time.