In the 1970s, the effort to improve the largely unregulated Emergency Medical Services was tasked to the Department of Transportation in response to the spike in traffic deaths resulting from Motor Vehicle Accidents.
Today, the Emergency Medical Workers of the United States are able to treat a much wider range of illnesses and injuries in the pre-hospital field than was ever envisioned 40 years ago. It has far outgrown the initial call to respond to traffic accidents. The regulation of the country's Emergency Medical Service should be given to the Department of Health and Human Services. In this way, the standards of EMS training could be vastly improved and determined by what is best for the health of a nation, and not treated as a relic of the ambulance driver days of the 1970s.