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\n Photo: John Taggart\/Redux\n <\/p>\n
Sooner or later, the slow-motion collapse of New York\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n \u201cMost critical, which would be cardiac arrest, was somewhere around 14 minutes. That\u2019s serious,\u201d Vincent Variale, president of the Uniformed EMS Officers Union, told me<\/a>. \u201cWe know brain death begins at four to six minutes. So if I\u2019m arriving at 14 minutes, I still need time to get into your house or your building and find you, that\u2019s probably another three to four minutes. So it\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Mayor Zohran Mamdani<\/a>\u2019s administration is aware of the problem. \u201cWe know this is unacceptable, and we are working tirelessly to reverse this trend,\u201d said FDNY\u2019s chief of department, John Esposito<\/a>. (Emergency Medical Services is a division of the Fire Department).<\/p>\n The root of the problem, as union leaders warned in March<\/a>, is the absurdly low pay that New York\u2019s frontline \u201cstreet doctors\u201d get. First-year emergency medical technicians (EMTs) make only $43,932, far lower than the entry-level salaries of firefighters ($54,122) and cops ($55,942), and less than what we pay first-year sanitation workers ($47,752). And while other uniformed personnel hit $100,000 within five and a half years, EMTs have smaller increases and top out at $68,700, with paramedics capped at $86,348.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have EMTs starting out at minimum wage, a little over $18 an hour,\u201d says Variale. \u201cTo live in New York City at that kind of salary, it\u2019s very hard to do it. And that\u2019s why people are leaving.\u201d<\/p>\n The low wages have led workers to look for part-time work; take the exam to snag a better-paying job as a firefighter; sleep in their cars<\/a> a few nights a week; or simply quit. Some even end up in homeless shelters, according to union leaders, and 14 have committed suicide <\/a>since 2020.<\/p>\n \u201cMore and more EMTs and paramedics are leaving the job. We estimate by the time this is over, 1,500 will be gone,\u201d says Variale, noting that 500 EMS workers have left so far this year. \u201cIt\u2019s terrible. The main cause of response times going up is people leaving the job.\u201d<\/p>\n A shrinking workforce prevents the city from having a sufficient number of ambulances ready for action. The average number of ambulances in service over the last five years was only 332, a number that recently rose to 416, but remains far below the department\u2019s official target number of 488, according to Levine, even as volume has hit a record high of more than 1.1 million calls per year.<\/p>\n