Narcisse asks for update on hospital liaison officers and handoff process

At the 2024 hearing, FDNY testified that it was assigning hospital liaison officers, which is HLOS, along with two EMS.

To nine of the busiest New York City health and hospital emergency department to facilitate patients hand off and reduce ambulance turnaround times.

Can you provide an update on the implementation and results of the initiative?

Has FDNY measured any changes in ambulance turnaround times?

availability, response times, or other operational metrics.

Which hospitals currently participate and are there plans to expand?

modify or make the programs permanent?

I know you start talking about it earlier, but just give me more detail.

So we did start initially with that amount of hospitals.

We did expand out to 13.

But like I said, while it did have a small impact on the reduction of time inside the hospital, the overall greater impact on response time was not seen.

So we reallocated those members back to the field because we felt like the greatest way to impact response time was to have more ambulances available on the street.

I understand.

The reason I'm asking you over is because I want to know what can we do right now?

You used the pilot program.

You repeated it for me.

Now what can we do to actually decrease it in the emergency room with the staff in the hospital?

You have seen the program.

You did the pilot.

It did not work.

But I believe that you have learned from it.

And what can we do?

Yeah, I think that, you know, what's really important is the continued communication between, like I said, the borough, the division and the and the Office of Medical Affairs with the individual hospitals to work on tweaking triage systems to be able to expedite

patients, you know, off of stretchers and off of our stretchers and onto and onto hospital stretchers.

But each individual hospital is dynamic.

So each one has to be individually, you know, studied, spoken about, and then different things have to be implemented in each hospital.

All right.

So have you started the conversation knowing that the pilot program did not work, but we got to do something to decrease the amount of time that they spend at the triage?

So have you heard any positive feedback or whatever the feedback that you had received?

Yeah, again, these conversations are happening, you know, monthly, in some locations quarterly, right?

They are happening and ongoing.

The increase in time after the HLU was ceased, we only saw an increase of about two minutes.

So we are, you know, and this is citywide, right?

This is citywide.

But I'm focused on H&H.

Right, right.

So we have a great partnership with H&H.

And like I said, we are continuously working together to improve.

Okay.

Can you walk us through the patient handoff process from start to finish once an EMS crew arrives at the hospital?

What responsibilities does the hospital liaison officer...

Oh, now you don't have that, so we're going to have to work back there.

So you already gave me that part.

Since we don't have that, I will not be able.

But there's no plan to return with that because it's only two minutes.

At the moment, there is not.

No.