[UPDATE BELOW] The epic blizzard kept city medics so busy that — for the first time ever — they were given a time limit for performing CPR on patients, The Post has learned.
EMS workers normally call a doctor for advice after working on a patient for 20 minutes.
The doctor normally allows them to keep trying to revive the person, sometimes letting them continue for more than an hour.
But faced with an enormous backlog of 1,300 calls, the medics were told to quit after 20 minutes and move on to the next case.
Also yesterday, there were five-hour delays in responding to some 911 medical calls and even three-hour delays in responding to “priority” calls, which range from cardiac arrest to a report of an unconscious person.
The number of calls was so high in the city that units from New Jersey were called in to help.
Patrick Bahnken, head of the paramedics and EMT union, said he was told of one case in which police alerted the FDNY that an unconscious person had died after going 90 minutes without help.
At the height of the storm Sunday night, a 9 p.m. call went out from the home of a pregnant woman at 76th Street and 15th Avenue in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, but no ambulance was available, officials said.
Instead, firefighters arrived and delivered little Jasmine Tierney nearly five hours later, at 1:59 a.m., after giving her anemic mother three bottles of oxygen.
But the family’s ordeal was not over. Firefighters finally flagged down an ambulance four blocks away and had to carry the mom on a stretcher through unplowed streets.
Hours later, another expectant mom in Flatbush had to ride in the jumpseat of a fire engine because no ambulances were available.
But firefighters got her to a hospital, where she delivered a healthy baby.
UPDATE: At a press conference with the Mayor, the FDNY Commissioner has just flatly denied this entire report. he stated that after 20 minutes medics called “telementry” for permission to terminate CPR.
(Source: NY Post)
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21 Responses
Killers??? These people are heroes, rushing to emergency calls in terrible weather through unplowed streets in ambulances that are designed to be operated on dry pavement.
As are the out of town EMTs. I passed eight non-FDNY ambulances on my way to work today — one from Catskill, which is 90 miles north!
FDNY EMS gets over a million calls a year — an average of over 2700 calls a day. FDNY only has about 3300 EMS workers.
This headline is offensive
We may be upset at the sanitation dept for the poor job they did
But triage is an important part of any emergency/crisis.
The facts are that the odds of reviving a patient after 20 min of CPR is essentially 0 (statistically it doesn’t happen)
EMS was doing the best they could in a difficult situation and leaving a patient after 20 min of unproductive CPR was absolutly the correct call
They were needed on another call where their services may have saved someone elses life
I’m an EMT (not Hatzolah, by the way) and I have to say I’m appalled with the headline of this article. How dare YWN say these brave men and women were “killers” in placing priority where it was due?
Whoever’s fault it was, there was a tremendous backlog of high priority patients. In this scenario, EMS must try to help as many people as they can. The ambulances were unable to traverse the roadways and were repeatedly stuck in snow drifts. Therefore, if a patient is unresponsive after 20 minutes of CPR in scenario like we just had (by the way, the brain starts to die after about 4 minutes or so- if he doesn’t come around after 20 minutes, he’s not going to!) it is the duty of the EMT to MOVE ON and try to save another life in danger.
Hatzolah did not have nearly the amount of patients that the “regular” EMS had to respond to throughout the ordeal.
All I’ve been reading for the past day or so on YWN is a constant bashing of New York EMTs. Enough.
ywn dioesnt mean fdny u ignorant bloggers.
they are referring to the higher-ups who instructed the medics to slap a 20 minute time limit on cpr.
If it was your father who they pronounced dead after 20 minutes, you would call them killers too.
And the city is lying and saying that no deaths were caused by their irresponsible behavior.
They are liars, because there are tens of deaths (such as cardiac arrest) which were not treatable due to the mismanagement.
Isn’t there a question mark after the word killers?
Take a deep breath.
It’s very debatable.
Law makers are looking to see if there was criminal behavior involved here, and if there was, expect the firing of the sanitation commish, dot commish, oem commish and others.
this very possibly can be labeled killers.
I know someone that died from a heart attack yest….so not sure was out beloved mayor is saying that there was no deaths….
Charlie -You’re right, but the question on the city is this -why do they have so few EMS personnel? Maybe it’s time to take some FF’s off engines and put them on buses? Maybe buy more buses (ambulances)? Maybe hire more EMS personnel? Maybe pay EMS equal to FF’s, so people will want to do EMS for the city? Maybe put automatic snow chains on all emergency vehicles (PD,FD,EMS) that can remain in place all year round? There definitely were deaths due to the city’s response to this storm. Since the things I mentioned would have made a difference if implemented prior, someone is responsible for all these preventable deaths! These things might cost money, but is money more important than human life?
If it was your father who they pronounced dead after 20 minutes, you would call them killers too.
I’m sure you would, in that case you have a right to be mad, but the question is this, had they kept doing CPR would the person have lived and in truth in 99.99% of cases the answer to that question is no.
Its easy to sit out here in Cyberspace and say that they did this or that wrong. But those in charge have to make hard choices, let the EMT’s keep doing CPR here or move on to someone else who needs help.
To quote Harry Truman, if you can’t take the heat get out of the kitchen.
reply to 4,5,6,7
clearly you are all not medical professionals
I am
Surviving such a scenerio (20 min of non productive CPR) is something that rarely happens. Even if EMS revives the patient they almost never survive more than a day.
It is very nice to get all emotional about this but it doesn’t change the facts.
If it was up to me I would have had EMS leaving after 10 minutes!
And I believe Halacha agrees with me. These patients are dead! Wasting effort on a dead patient and hoping for a miracle while someone else needs your help is irresponsible and foolish.
The FDNY made the correct call.
I’m Israeli, and here Hatzolah faced similar questions on terror atacks. They asked rabbis, and the psak halacha was that when you have an emrgency situation with too many injured people, and while treating one in severe situation you can save 3 others in better condition, YOU SHOULD TREAT THE BETTER CONDITION INJURIES FIRST. I think this is a similar situation – trying to save as many as you can – so you must not kill them killers. They did exactly what they had to do.
# 11 clearly you aren’t either a medical professional, beacause doing CPR pumps the blood and oxygenated blood can get to the brain. However, if they can start the heart that is a different story, but giving up after 10 minutes like you suggested would be murderous.
I would like to thank YWn for changing the headline, since the original did not “paas” for a frum website.
That being said, the medics and EMTs shouldn’t be blamed, it is the city officials who have called every shot in this stom incorrectly who should be taking the balem. The same goes for Sanitation, they cannot be blamed for following orders.
Bloomberg ( I refer to him since the commmisoners all anser to him) and administration caused Chaod by ignoring the main roads in both Queens and Brooklyn. They did a terrible job.
AAYM -The guy didn’t mean it, he is just upset about the other posters. You can’t even make it through the whole AHA-ECC Cardiac Arrest protocol in 10 minutes. Anyway it’s not murder, just abandoment of care!
#13 aaym-
Clearly you are not qualified, by the look of your response to #11, to comment on anything remotely related to the medical field and medicine as a whole.
As you wrote: “beacause doing CPR pumps the blood and oxygenated blood can get to the brain”.
That is absolutely true. However, after about 4 minutes (give or take a minute) the brain, which is the ONLY cell in you body that cannot store glucose, starts to die without the blood sending fuel to it. Therefore, when someone goes into cardiac arrest (and I’m not even talking about the myocardial infarction issue), they have approximately 4 minutes to get the heart going again. CPR is designed to try to continue the “fuel supply” to the brain. Other cell types in your body, which are able to store glucose, do not have this issue (they can survive for far longer on stored glycogen). But, as you mentioned, they still need oxygen to continue aerobic respiration (glycolysis, krebs cycle, and the electron transport chain located in the mitochondria of the cell). Therefore, CPR is initiated as soon as possible to try to do two things: get oxygen to the tissues, as well as the most important one of all- get oxygen and glucose to the brain, or else the patient is dead either way.
20 minutes without proper myocardial tissue function is a long, long time. Cardiac cells require a lot of glucose and oxygen to function, and if they aren’t getting it for whatever reason (such as a myocardial infarction due to a blocked coronary artery), you can do all the CPR you want, to no avail.
On a regular warm, sunny day, EMS has the luxury of attempting CPR for a long time (upwards to an hour), but the statistics are still the same; someone who goes into cardiac arrest has an extremely slim chance of surviving, CPR or not.
However, what happened on Sunday night was a literal weather disaster; that luxury disappeared. Thousands of patients were in need of emergency care, and due to the snow it was almost impossible to travel on the roads in city ambulances. Therefore, this type of scenario falls under something called “MCI” management- ever heard of it? If not, go google it. Triage is necessary to try to save as many people as possible; if someone has practically no chance of surviving, as with a patient with a cardiac arrest of twenty minutes, it is the duty of the EMT to MOVE ON and try to help someone that could be saved.
It’s easy for you, sitting in your chair in your comfy home, to judge those that put their own lives in danger to help others. But I completely agree with the 20 minute limit of CPR in such a scenario.
And finally- if you would ever like to comment on a story, please, for the sake of those reading it and your own integrity, learn how to spell.
Health,
Thank you for your good ideas. They have elevated what had started out as an absolutely offensive discussion. All are worthy of consideration. I hope that FDNY and the City Administration will consider some of these ideas once they have reviewed the disaster that occurred, and I hope that many of us will support the tax increases (hopefully small) that will be required to make the changes that are implemented.
REPLY TO 13,14
I ABSOLUTELY MEANT EVERY WORD
I am always astonished by the level of ignorance often displayed here especially since it isn’t that difficult to check the facts
There is nothing magical about CPR
as 13 said CPR is to keep oxygenated blood flowing toward the brain but that is the only thing he got right
you still need to re-start the heart. Drugs (epinephrine) and defibrillators are used for that
GO ONLINE AND GOOGLE SUCCESS RATES FOR CPR WITHOUT IMMEDIATE DEFIBRILLATION
its extremely poor
and after 5-10 minutes its essentially non existant
and as i said before even if you get the heart started these patients rarely last the day
BUT since this is a jewish website lets quote Halacha
Halachic death is a person who is not breathing
If you are needed to treat a live patient
and instead you stay with a dead one hoping for a miracle, that is bordering on murder
All this info is available on the web
do some research, learn some halacha instead of wasting your time writing stupidity on these blogs
@ #5 ‘Samsonite’:
“If it was your father who they pronounced dead after 20 minutes, you would call them killers too.”
How about if it was you’re father who they never made it too because they spent an hour trying to revive others?
Mentsch -If you meant it, because of dismal statistics and you would stop CPR after 10 minutes -you deserve to lose your license or cert., whatever you have. It’s impossible to get through the whole cardiac arrest protocol in 10 minutes -20 maybe. So you believe in making your own protocol, instead of doing the national one, you really don’t belong practicing medicine. I never disagreed with the – after 20 minutes start considering terminating, but not after ten minutes. Where did you go to school? I like to call the director up and ask him what kind of students he/she are producing! BTW, noone here said whether they defibrillated on these CPR calls. Probably did and still they are calling it after 20 minutes. You put in defib into the scenario and yet noone has mentioned it. Please tell me you’re just an EMT, not a medic because if you’re a medic anybody you treat isn’t going to make out very well!
reply to Health
you (and the others) keep on missing the point
This was a triage situation
All protocals are irrelavant!
A 20 min protocal is nice if you have the time. In this situation EMS was required to make a decision. Do we spend the time on this guy or move on to someone else who we have a better chance of helping?
Besides for all the statistics I mentioned before;
The facts are the person in front of you is halachically dead. you have no requirement to spend even 1 minute of precious time on a dead guy.
On the other hand you do have a requirement to help someone who is still alive.
Its a no-brainer.
I don’t think you are being intellectually honest.
If you had 2 patients in front of you one who was unresponsive after 10 minutes of defibrillation, drugs, CPR etc. and another patient who just went into cardiac arrest I think you and everyone else would move unto the second patient.
This scenerio is no different, its just that the 2 patients were at different locations.
Thats what triage is all about. It may be an emotionally difficult decision but we are jews and halacha guides us.
Its a no-brainer. You need to save the living instead of allowing emotions to tie you down and hope for a miracle of techias hamesim on a dead guy.
Mentsch – Actually you’re missing the point. This isn’t a real triage like in a mass casualty situation. The next call you come to might be a life-threating situation and it might not. You also are misrepresenting halacha. Even if a person is in cardiac arrest, you have to resuscitate acc. to halacha. In real triage, you have examined both patients and one is critical and one is without signs of life. Then priority is given to the critical patient. Here -you only have one patient in front of you -this patient must be treated acc. to protocol. This protocol will take at least 20 min. I guess you don’t have that much experience and think that because some dispatcher assigned it as life-threating, it must be. In this case your priority must be given to the patient at hand -the one in cardiac arrest. You aren’t responsible for someone else, but if you can finish your job in a shorter amount of time than usual, then this is best -so you can respond to another! I think you mean well, but can’t differentiate between a patient in front of you and one waiting in the wings. In the ER, one of the reasons we have medical professionals doing triage is because they shouldn’t over-triage or under-triage. Do you really think a dispatcher can accurately triage a patient, with minimal medical education and without seeing them? Since they Don’t Know, their job is to over-triage. I found many ER nurses or PA’s don’t always triage correctly, but it’s mostly not their fault. The gov. would close down any ER- if we only did 10 min. for cardiac arrest and then called it because there is another waiting. Each patient deserves the minimum. And believe me, there are always patients waiting in ER’s and some are critical.