Ariola questions FDNY on ambulance no-show at St. Francis Prep
Ariola asks why an ambulance never arrived for Jennifer Daly's son Kevin after he showed signs of a stroke. Esposito calls it unacceptable, and Chief Paul Miano says the 911 system was experiencing more than 100 extra calls; the call was classified as unknown and an ambulance arrived after the patient had already left for the hospital.
Thank you, Chief.
I just want to go and ask a few questions regarding the incident that took place at St.
Francis Preparatory High School that Ms.
Daly testified to.
Going back to her testimony, Jennifer Daly noted that an ambulance never arrived for her child.
Who was showing signs of a stroke.
Can you explain why an ambulance did not arrive that day?
So before I defer to Chief Miano, we want to express our thoughts that it is unacceptable that we're not able to get an ambulance there in time.
As a parent, the thought that your child goes to school, has a medical emergency, it's recognized and they call for help.
It's unacceptable and we have to do better.
I'll pass it to Chief Miano and Chief Werner to describe the specific circumstances and what happened that day.
Thank you.
So echoing what Chief Esposito just said, this is a tragic incident that we, you know, want to try and stop from happening in the future.
During the period of time where this call came in, EMD or the 911 system was experiencing an extreme number of calls, more than 100 calls than we normally receive during this period of time.
Our call takers.
They don't just answer a phone and say, where's the address, and then dispatch out an ambulance.
They spend a few minutes on the phone with each caller trying to ascertain exactly what is going on with that caller so we can dispatch the correct type of ambulance.
Unfortunately, during this time when the call was received, again, there were a high number of calls that came in, and our alarm receiving dispatches were on the phone with other callers.
That does not mean that this call was not dispatched.
It was dispatched.
It was sent from our NYPD dispatcher over to the EMS dispatch, and it was put into the system.
It was classified as an unknown condition because we did not get to speak to the caller and triage the call ourself.
The call was dispatched out to an ambulance.
The ambulance did start traveling towards the call, but the ambulance was coming from a distance, and it did take beyond.
The ambulance did arrive.
They arrived, unfortunately, after the patient left to go to the hospital.
At this point, I'm just going to pause questions because we've been joined by our speaker, Julie Menon, and she does have a statement that she would like to read.