Emergency Medical Services in the United States
, (herein, EMS)
provide out-of-hospital acute medical care and/or transport to definitive care for those in need. They are regulated at the most basic level by the federal
government, which sets the minimum standards that all states' EMS providers must meet, and regulated more strictly by individual state
governments, which often require higher standards from the services they oversee.
Wide differences in population density
, and other conditions can call for different types of EMS systems; consequently, there is often significant variation between the Emergency Medical Services provided in one state and those provided in another.
Organization and funding
EMS delivery in the US can be based on various model
. While most services are, to some degree, publicly-funded, the factor which often differentiates services is the manner in which they are operated. EMS systems may be directly operated by the community, or they may fall to a third-party provider, such as a private company
. The most common operating models in the U.S. include:
In one of the more common publicly-operated models, an EMS system is operated directly by the municipality it services. The services themselves may be provided by a local government, or may be the responsibility of the regional (or state) government. Municipality-operated services may be funded by service fees and supplemented by property taxes
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