NYers Often Face Long Waits For Paramedics, Report Finds

NEW YORK — The ambulances are almost as bad as the subways. Paramedics took more than 10 minutes to respond to nearly half of New York City's medical crises last year, falling short of a two-decade-old goal, a recent report shows.

Paramedics responded within 10 minutes to about 54 percent of 2018's roughly 314,000 serious medical emergencies, such as choking and heart attacks, according to an analysis the city's Independent Budget Office released Friday.

That's far below the goal of 90 percent established in 1996, when ambulance operations moved to from the city's public hospital system to the New York City Fire Department, the report says.

About 46 percent of ambulance responses to serious emergencies took longer than 10 minutes last year, city figures show. Response times have fluctuated across the city over the last five years, but Queens residents have struggled the most with long waits, the report shows.

Paramedics took longer than 10 minutes to respond to 55 percent of the borough's nearly 62,000 serious emergencies, the analysis found. Some 5,000 of the responses, or about 8 percent, took longer than 20 minutes, a higher rate than all four of the other boroughs, the report says.

By contrast, just 40 percent of responses in Manhattan took longer than 10 minutes last year, up from 36 percent in 2017 but still the lowest rate in the city, the budget office found.

The Bronx's rate of long responses jumped to 47 percent last year after dropping to 43 percent in 2017, the report says. The previous decrease came after the city started its "Fly Car" program in the borough, which aims to get paramedics to serious emergencies as quickly as possible, according to the report.

Highly trained paramedics are sent to the most dire medical emergencies, known as "Advanced Life Support" incidents, while emergency medical technicians handle less serious cases, the Independent Budget Office says. FDNY dispatchers are responsible for assigning ambulances to emergencies, according to a previous IBO report.