Speaker Menin calls EMS understaffing and low pay a crisis
Speaker Julie Menin thanks the committees for holding a life-saving hearing and says New York City faces a crisis in its EMS teams. She says EMS responds to 1.6 million calls with only about 4,500 members, and low pay has led to attrition, recruitment problems, and workers living in shelters or cars.
Thank you so much, Chair Ariel, and I really want to thank you and the committee for holding this incredibly important, literally life-saving hearing today.
So I really wanted to come by, first of all, to say that we all know in the city that we are truly facing a crisis regarding our EMS teams who are obviously part of FDNY.
These teams save lives, yet they are understaffed and they are underpaid.
And this city council is very serious about this issue.
These EMS teams, I don't need to overstate this, are truly saving lives every single day.
They're responding to 1.6 million calls compared to FDNY's 500,000, yet they're only staffed by 4,500 members compared to FDNY's 13,000.
The average length of service for an emergency medical technician is just under three years because the pay of $18 an hour for hard, long work is simply untenable.
So we are hearing story after story of our EMS workers, many of whom after their job are going and living in a shelter because they literally cannot afford housing or some are sleeping in their cars.
This is truly unacceptable.
I don't know what kind of city we are that we are.
allowing this to continue.
The lack of adequate pay has obviously led to both rising attrition and low recruitment, which of course perpetuates this understaffing issue.
With fewer staff, there are fewer ambulances ready to go at a moment's notice, which is obviously deepening the delays.
And when New Yorkers cannot rely on the emergency medical services to quickly respond to an emergency, who can they rely on?