Shortly after her 14-year-old son, Kevin, arrived at school on Sept. 28, Jennifer Daly received a call from the nurse\u2019s office. Kevin was feeling weak, and one of his eyes was blurry.<\/p>\n
Ms. Daly, who owns a day care in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens, headed to the school, and the nurse called an ambulance.<\/p>\n
As Ms. Daly was stuck in traffic, the nurse called 911 again and said Kevin might be having a stroke. Ms. Daly\u2019s husband, a retired New York City firefighter, called 911 too.<\/p>\n
Ms. Daly got to the school roughly an hour after the call, and the ambulance still had not arrived. She took her son to the hospital herself. Medical tests confirmed he had, in fact, had a stroke.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, Ms. Daly told her story, which was earlier reported by WABC-TV<\/a>, to the City Council during an hourslong hearing about the troubling rise in the city\u2019s emergency response times.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s kind of sickening, because they should have availability for things like this,\u201d she said in an interview after the hearing.<\/p>\n It is now taking 41.2 percent longer for ambulances to respond to life-threatening emergencies than it did a decade ago and more than twice as long for non-life-threatening emergencies, according to a recent report by the New York City comptroller<\/a>. Response times for life-threatening emergencies took almost as long as response times did for non-life-threatening emergencies in 2015.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is apparent to anyone paying attention that our city has struggled to meet its obligations to provide timely emergency medical care to all New Yorkers,\u201d said Joann Ariola, the chair of the Council Committee on Fire and Emergency Management.<\/p>\n No one contested her assessment.<\/p>\n \u201cThe department is currently engaged in a challenging period of increasing response times,\u201d said John Esposito, the Fire Department\u2019s chief of department. \u201cWe know this is unacceptable, and we are working tirelessly to reverse this trend.\u201d<\/p>\n Both Fire Department officials and union officials said that lagging worker pay has created a retention and recruitment problem. While the department has a budget for 4,500 emergency medical service workers, it only employs about 4,000, Mr. Esposito said.<\/p>\n