Donna Martin was in her yard in Morgan County one day last summer when a wasp stung her.

Martin, a 73-year-old grandmother and active tennis player, suffered a severe allergic reaction. She soon went into cardiac arrest.

Her young granddaughter called 911. But both of the rural county’s ambulances were out on other calls. A volunteer firefighter arrived at Martin’s Madison home and administered CPR while they waited for an ambulance. The house was about a mile from Morgan Medical Center.

An ambulance from neighboring Greene County arrived nearly 30 minutes later, said Martin’s daughter, Ellen Sims.

Martin was transported to the Morgan hospital, where “they brought her back to life,’’ said Sims. Later she was transported to Piedmont Athens Regional. Martin died there that evening, just about five hours after the wasp sting, Sims said.

This tragic case, among others, has helped drive General Assembly discussion around House Bill 264, which would establish some statewide policies on emergency medical services.

Sims said the House bill would put a stronger spotlight on ambulance response times.

The legislation, as passed by the House, would require EMS services to give quarterly reports on the number of 911 calls received and the number answered by their ambulance company. The bill also would require reporting of a unit’s response time after an emergency call, plus details about the response.

But on Monday, a Senate committee significantly weakened the bill, including removing the required reporting of response times.

Wait times for ambulances have become a major issue, and not just in rural areas. The city of Dunwoody, in the Atlanta suburbs, got so many complaints from residents about long wait times that it declared an EMS “emergency,’’ asking to break off from DeKalb County’s ambulance zone and create its own.

DeKalb recently put out a bid for an ambulance provider that includes mandated response times, ranging from under 12 minutes for critical emergency calls to less than 30 minutes for non-emergency calls, according to the Reporter Newspapers.

Ambulance bill

House Bill 264, as passed in that chamber, would require the 10 local EMS coordinating councils in the state to establish conflict-of-interest policies, barring council members connected to ambulance providers from voting on contracts. Council meetings would have to abide by the state’s open meeting laws. And the Georgia Department of Public Health would have to make recommendations to each council on setting clear accountability standards for its EMS zone.

The Senate Rules Committee stripped out the open meeting provision and the response time reporting requirements, as well as the accountability standards, from the EMS bill. The new version passed the Senate unanimously Tuesday.

Rules Committee Chairman Jeff Mullis (R-Chickamauga), who presented the bill in the Senate, declined to be interviewed on the changes, but said through a spokeswoman that he wanted to send the legislation into a conference committee with the House.

The lead sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Bill Werkheiser (R-Glennville), said after the Senate vote, “I’m disappointed for the victims. I feel they have been disrespected. The committee processes have been disrespected.” He added that he was taken “totally by surprise’’ by the Senate’s gutting of the bill.

Werkheiser said last week that the House proposal has been revised nine times, mainly to allay the concerns of EMS providers. “My door has been very open,’’ he said. He added that he has heard ‘‘testimonies from folks all over the state who say they have not been served well by their ambulance provider.

“Victims say they can’t get information’’ about wait times, Werkheiser said. “We’re asking that it be reported in a public format.’’

The conference committee will seek to iron out the differences between the House and Senate versions.

Officials in the EMS business say that while some areas of the state are very transparent on response times, others are not.

Transparency and accountability

The ambulance provider in the Morgan County case, National EMS, says it supports transparency “100 percent.’’

“We do reports to the county on a quarterly basis,’’ said Huey Atkins, director of operations for National. “We support transparency, accountability.’’ He also said he’s not opposed to barring EMS officials from voting on contracts.

The Martin case, Atkins said, “was terrible, tragic.’’

“Every county has a limited number of ambulances,’’ Atkins said. In the Martin situation, he added, “we had three calls come in within nine minutes.’’

The number of ambulances is a matter of local funding, he noted. Running a third ambulance 24/7 would cost $500,000, he said.

Ambulance companies, Atkins said, face problems that may not be obvious to the public. They have to deal with some people who call for non-emergencies – using the ambulance “as a taxi.’’

And the companies also have to contend with a national shortage of paramedics and EMTs.