ny10570

Supervisors are automatically assigned to several call types and actively encouraged to take a proactive role in patient care. They are also delegated responsibilities in determining hospital destination and RMA approval. As part of our 5 year recert program they now handle a substantially portion of our training. We have only 4 or 5 physicians for 3,000 emts and paramedics, making officers are responsible for identifying dangerous practices that require intervention and possible retraining. There is nothing that says an EMT cannot be an excellent supervisor. However your marginal and poor supervisors are much less of a problem when they know the job they're trying to manage and your excellent supervisors can become better involved and facilitate better patient care.

So by the time I got to work the were calling for 2 to 5" for the 5 boroughs. We were all issued skeds for equipment and patient transport over long distances. Two different chiefs visited the station to check salt, vehicles, snow blowers, toy shovels, and canvas members for overnight availability tomorrow. Panic mode is rocking! 6" on the ground with a blizzard warning and we had to unwrap a snow blower that had been delivered for a station that still hasn't been built. Predicting a maximum of less than 6" and everyone is in a tizzy.

To demand a chief have the training of everyone they supervise is ridiculous. To expect an immediate supervisor to have the training of the people under them is perfectly reasonable. An intelligent Chief places people into positions where their experiences and training supplement their own abilities. Isn't the Lt or Capt in charge of a company trained in the operations of that company? All HazTac bosses are immediately sent through the HazTac training and the new Lts are being sent to Rescue training. How is this any different? You don't put someone without teaching experience in charge of a school. The guy leading a team of programers is a programer. The person running a lab is Phd. Are you seeing a trend? Sorry, but the EMT curriculum, protocols, and training are disappointingly dumbed down and not enough.

FDNY minus a few very isolated examples does need the same coverage at 0300 as they need at 1500. While in the overnight you have fewer workers and less traffic you have more sleeping residents and more delayed notification. Day time you're boxed in by traffic and more units are used chasing greater call volume. No neighborhood demonstrates extreme daily swings in population better than the financial district, but even here there is a substantial residential population and a bigger than I ever imagined workforce going on in the overnights.

At least the battalion chief had all of the training of a truckie and has worked many tours on the truck even if he managed to somehow get all the way to BC without being assigned to a truck. How many SOC officers never did time in a SOC company? EMTs leading medics was a mistake that's finally being addressed.

And proboards is down.

Ugh, predicated blizzard got nothing until there was snow on the ground and roads were already treacherous. I'm going in tonight and I guarantee they hit the pannic button. 1 for 1 relief, all units staffed 100%, and all leave cancelled. Yay me!!

A fleet of 4x4 buses just for winter emergencies would be a ridiculous waste of money, just as switching to all 4x4 ambulances. It would also create fleet wide clearance issues as opposed to just the HazTac/Rescue buses that are being rethought for the next order. Tire chains were abandoned because of the damage they cause to vehicles. Broken links were tearing up the boxes of ambulances that couldn't stop because they were transporting critical patients. Ambulances getting stuck were an infrequent problem and sanitation was able to free stuck vehicles in a reasonable amount of time. As a result of this mess traction aids are being revisited and now there are rubber and plastic versions being looked out. The city in areas got more snow than anywhere else. People keep going back to the central park total because thats what the media always uses when talking about NYC weather totals. 30"+ in parts of Brooklyn and Staten Island plus gusting winds that left snow drifts covering entire cars. Sanitation didn't get the job done. Wether it was a slowdown, poor maintenance, inexperienced workers, or all of the above it doesn't change the fact that even the plows and fire apparatus were getting stuck.

Correct, EMS operations runs parallel to fire operations. It gets weird where training and communications are concerned. In both cases EMS and Fire report to the same Chief, but the EMS side also falls under the command of the chief of EMS. Its potentially nightmare made functional by men like Chief Galvin who recognize the mess and don't force unnecessary involvement. Correct, EMS officers hold no more power over firefighters. Same for Fire officers over emt's and medics. Patient care we're in charge and scene safety/patient extrication you guys are in charge. As long as egos stay out it works well. The mess with EMTs supervising medics is finally being addressed. For the last Lt exam and all future exams gotta be a medic to get promoted. Next in the pipe is actual time in the field as a medic. Here's one catch, doesn't matter what the training of the supervisor the person ultimately responsible is the highest medical authority that provides patient care. EMTs have gotten jammed up because a medic boss gave a bad order and the boss more or less skates because we operate under Dept rules and DOH/Remac rules. EMS traditionally has been a very poorly supervised job. Back in the good ol days there would be one or two bosses patrolling an entire borough. Now you see the level of supervision we have. Its a growing process integrating the bosses into the work but little things like bosses documenting patient care when on scene before anyone else was never done and still can't be handled by our computers.

No, now he's the same rank as the chief of fire operations. Its an appointment, so while it is still only symbolic it an important symbol of respect for the position.

FDNY 489,354 total incidents. 213,292 EMS Runs. 26,595 Structure Fires. FDNY EMS 1,236,819 incidents. 940,712 transports.

If there was no arrest there's possibly no searchable record. Patient was just escorted it may not be any more than a log in the officers book. NYC its at the most an aided card, same as for the ankle sprain they get flagged for and await EMS.

Police escort or police custody are two very different things.

Public view. The accident happened on a public road and the photographer to no advantage of special access to take the photo. He can post away/.

EMS Station Map

Not in NY because the way the the death penalty requirements were written led to it being invalidated by the courts. Blame the conservatives who wrote the legislation.

The positive literature is out there, success stories are piling up, the equipment is cheap, so when is Westchester jumping onboard with pre-hospital hypothermia induction?

The Phelps unit is staffed by very capable and competent people. Its far from being unused as its used in a number of different treatments and was part of a successful DOH pilot to expand hyperbaric therapy. However maybe tapout can correct me but I believe the Phelps chamber cannot dive ventilated patients. Phelps also isn't a burn center and last I checked doesn't have a substantial stock of cyanide antidote. So asside from an uncomplicated straight CO exposure the patients need to go to a more capable facility like Jacobi.

Looks like a type 2 or 3, van front. Wouldn't be FDNY.

They were not abandoning the patients. They were triaging them out through telemetry. There 10 code for it, but I don't remember it. No clue how many arrests were terminated without ALS. Hopefully it will come out in the investigation No idea how many ambulances were running, however every available ambulance was running. The membership turned out and were committed to getting the job done. I did the first 6 hours of my shift no heat and had an EMT volunteer to ride third in a patient compartment with the AC stuck on high. We had crews waiting for broken trucks to get fixed and a thrid member on almost every ALS and in most command cars. The Brooklyn delivery wasn't as simple as a woman in labor was left for so many hours. Initially it was a regular woman in labor, a low priority job. After repeated calls to check on the condition of the patient while awaiting an available ambulance went unanswered another caller reported eminent birth, upgrading the call to a higher priority. An hour later PD arrived reporting the unresponsive baby at which point it became an OB-out and an ALS was assigned. 12 minutes after that call EMS was on scene. Every call left in the system waiting for an ambulance gets regular calls to check on the patient. The shovels were a joke. One plastic shovel that collapsed or broke on anything but light and fluffy powder and the other is an entrenching tool. Great for foxholes, useless for stuck ambulances.

The actual story is that after 20 minutes of CPR with no ROSC, no shocks delivered, and no EMS available CFRs were allowed to terminate resuscitation. Same rules applied to BLS crews that were unable to transport. ALS crews and all other arrests continued with standard protocols.

NYC has something like 20,000 lane miles and less than 3,000 sanitation plows, sanders and loaders and another 100 some odd DOT trucks. They are woefully equipped for a job of this magnitude, but how do you economically maintain a force capable of handling something big? Recent cuts I'm sure hurt but wouldn't have turned this into a win. When even the plows are getting stuck, what do you do? Saw it myself, several garbage trucks buried.

I take back waht I said about the 10 hour cfr run. It was Eng 289 in Queens. Sat on scene 10 hours with a few O2 drops by the truck before the battalion finally came and took the patient.

Correct, it was 20 from NJ. People forget, parts of Brooklyn and Queens got nearly 3 feet of snow. This is one of the biggest storms to wallop NYC. In 96 when they got 20 inches over 12 hours the national guard was brought in to help get to calls and some calls still weren't answered 24hrs later. This time not even a snow emergency from the city that would have banned unnecessary cars from the streets. Instead as I write this there are still cars abandoned in the street. NYCs snow removal plan is very structured and does not take into account differences in snow accumulation. They cannot afford to be able to clear the streets 24hrs after a 3 foot dump like Syracuse and Buffalo can. The city is just too tightly packed and congested. Declaring an emergency and enforcing vehicle bans once the severity of the storm was obvious would have helped. EMS initiating a recall starting with the overnight tour sunday into Monday would have allowed them to get ahead of the staffing shortage the crippled us that morning. We have no ability to free vehicles stuck in snow besides waiting for sanitation and when they're struggling to keep the primary roadways open we're not a priority no matter what the OEM director says. There's definitely room for improvement, but that much snow plus 911 abuse will always crush the system.

At its peak there were over 1200 jobs backlogged in the system. As of 10pm still "several hundred". Nearly all backlogged calls in Brooklyn and Queens. As of 8pm Manhattan had cleared and at some point this evening Bronx cleared their board. I have heard 20 ambulances from Jersey total and 20 each to Brooklyn and Queens. Not sure yet which is accurate. As of Midnight 97 ambulances were stuck, some for hours. Sanitation still has primary roads that are not fully cleared due to stuck cars, trucks, and buses(mta not EMS). Total for 12/27 was 6,247 jobs in the system. Figure 1,000 were for stuck ambulances and that puts us a full 2,000 above a busy day this time of year. In the summer when additional units are regularly addded to the system we do as many as 4,000. The system simply imploded under the strain. A 60% increase in call volume would hurt on a normal day. This has just been too much compounded with delayed action from the department and flat out inaction by the city. I put as much stock in the CFR 10hr asthma story as I believe Sanitation isn't clearing streets as part of a job action. First, CFRs are not assigned to low priority jobs, only life threatening medical jobs. While these were also holding for up to an hour in several cases there's no way it'd go 10hrs unnoticed especially with a CFR on scene calling for ETAs from EMS. I think the longest a call sat waiting was around 12 hours and it was a low priority sick in Brooklyn. Second firefighters are not dumb. If they had someone who is really sick they're not going to just stare at them and keep changing O2 tanks for hours on end.