New York’s EMS Crisis Could Kill You |
Sooner or later, the slow-motion collapse of New York’s response system for medical emergencies will force city leaders to get off their asses and address problems that should have been fixed long ago. Innocent people are already paying the price of City Hall perennially starving ambulance first responders of the salaries, benefits, and work conditions they deserve.
Over the last decade, response time on life-threatening medical emergencies has jumped by nearly four minutes, an increase of more than 41 percent, according to a recent report by City Comptroller Mark Levine. Non-life-threatening response time has more than doubled, by almost 15 minutes. That extra time can be the difference between life and death.
“Most critical, which would be cardiac arrest, was somewhere around 14 minutes. That’s serious,” Vincent Variale, president of the Uniformed EMS Officers Union, told me. “We know brain death begins at four to six minutes. So if I’m arriving at 14 minutes, I still need time to get into your house or your building and find you, that’s probably another three to four minutes. So it’s almost 20 minutes before we actually get down and work on the patient. Brain death has already started. The survivability of that patient has plummeted.”
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration is aware of the problem. “We know this is unacceptable, and we are working tirelessly to reverse this trend,” said FDNY’s chief of department, John Esposito. (Emergency Medical Services is a division of the Fire Department).
The root of the problem, as union leaders........