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TOPEKA — After making substantial changes, a House committee on Thursday approved a bill that assigns new duties and in some cases titles for the different levels of Emergency Medical Services workers.

The House Health and Human Services Committee approved Senate Bill 262. The bill provides new definitions of the various categories of EMS workers, such as Emergency Medical Technicians and paramedics, and what procedures those workers would be allowed to do.

The new definitions better match those used in other states, officials from the Kansas EMS Board have said, which will help EMS workers certified in other states make a more seamless transition into Kansas services.

The bill was introduced last year and approved by the Senate. The House health committee held a hearing on it earlier this year and it appeared to be on its way to the House floor.

But a number of things happened. The EMS board's Executive Director, Robert Waller, resigned shortly after the hearing. And the EMS board, after reviewing the bill, discovered that the old definitions of EMS categories would need to be put back into the bill to accommodate an expected five-year transition to the new categories.

The House health committee on a voice vote approved the bill conceptually, including the new definitions. But it also removed language that would have allowed the EMS board to detail specific roles for each category of worker through regulations.

The Kansas Medical Society had objected to an earlier version of the bill that gave the EMS board the authority to define the entire scope of practice in regulation instead of statute. A compromise was discussed in February that would define broad parameters in statute but then be further detailed in the board’s regulations.

Committee Chairwoman Rep. Brenda Landwehr, R-Wichita, said she was concerned about making sure that the scope of practice was clearly spelled out in statute as opposed to regulation.

Jerry Slaughter, executive director of the medical society, said the group could live with the bill as it was drafted, but said the committee should consider how much power it would cede to agencies to define their own scopes of practice for medical providers.

"Traditionally, most of those decisions have been made here by the Legislature," he said.

Steve Sutton, the EMS board's interim executive director, asked the committee to keep the regulatory piece in play.

Current statutes define practices and in some cases technology has changed over time that alter practices, Sutton said. If the board could update those practices through regulations, they wouldn't have to come back to the Legislature to make the changes.

The broad parameters that remain in the bill, without further regulatory definition, would be subject to perhaps differing interpretations by local medical directors, he said.

"We're a little bit disappointed that the decision was made this way," Sutton said after the meeting. "I need to try to get them to understand the impact of eliminating that (regulatory) language."