Union leaders add attrition and training-cost numbers

Can I give you one more number?

It's been brought up about this transfer to fire.

They call it a promotion.

We are now losing officers to the fire class.

So you talk about experience.

The experience strength has been traditionally the officers that has gone down over the years.

And now people have moved up three ranks.

And they're going into the fire class because they don't make enough money here.

And we bring numbers since we moved to training.

The chief of the department in his testimony with the promotion cycle of 358 EMTs, 63 paramedics.

Numbers help.

OLR's numbers, it costs $45,000 to train an EMT.

It costs $100,000 to train a paramedic.

So that means this year we've thrown $22.3 million into training and sent them over to another service.

We have done the same amount of calls this year that we have done last year.

The reimbursement rate this year is down $50 million, and they wanted to know why.

Well, when you're holding jobs for three, four hours, and then you're making a phone call that says, hey, you still need us?

You're not billing for that.

So if for.

No other reason.

You don't care about a life.

You don't care about nothing else.

You just wasted $75 million on poor management.

We all know the city of New York has policies, has bureaucracies.

But if the FDNY EMS system was run as a Fortune 500 company, we would be bankrupt.

It would be, it's terrible.

Your stat of putting a human life to this is why we're having positive discussions.

We've been up 22 years talking about our members homeless.

Nobody seems to care, not because they don't care about the individual, because the system won't let it done.

Why are we having positive conversations?

Because in your district, in your district, in your district, people are hurting or dying.

My colleagues mentioned how we have real-time stats.

I got a call right now.

It's called a gynecological hemorrhage, which means there is a woman bleeding possibly from that area.

She's been sitting in a lobby for two hours right now.

That's the stat right now as I look at the phone.

So the fire department is going to come up here and say, this is a non-critical injury.

This is New York City.

This is not a math problem that I need Albert Einstein to solve.

Fire has a five-minute response time because they got 13,000 personnel that deal with 100,000 fires.

They are so overstaffed that they can do the overflow of 400,000 medical calls.

Give me 15,000 people and anybody and their mother can call 911 and get an ambulance whenever they want.

is a crisis in New York City.

And eventually, every single one of us in this room are going to have to answer for why people are dying left and right.

And that's why we're here today.

As Anthony said, as Vinny said, this isn't a crisis that's coming tomorrow.

This is going on right now.

If I can add to that also, the non-life-threatening calls that they hold, like as you said, two hours, and I don't consider that life-threatening.

You're bleeding out.

That's not life-threatening.

But a non-life-threatening call can very easily turn into a life-threatening call.

Nobody's there.

And I'm glad you brought up the unknown, the segment, the unknown they classified as a segment four.

I don't understand why it's a segment four.

It should be higher than that because it's unknown.

How do you know it's not a cardiac arrest?

I can tell you my personal experience as an EMT.

I've had a call that came over as a non-critical injury because the person said, in what I was reading on the computer, the person fell.

When I got there, the person fell because they had a heart attack.

They were in cardiac arrest.

Now it turns into a priority one.

And now I got to ask for ambulance, for paramedics and all sorts of more resources.

But if you don't know, it should be a higher priority.

I would think at least in the top two, three, not a four.

Right.

Because we don't know.

And in that case, that that kid had a stroke.

I mean, I don't know how that wasn't reclassified.

I can't blame the dispatch system.

I know they're trying, working very hard.

They're also.

Understaffed.

So, you know, all this stuff has to go back to we need to support and fund a life-saving service called EMS now to have turned this ship around because it's not going to happen overnight.

It's going to take time to do it.

So every day we wait, we're going to be waiting longer to get to see the results.

So thank you.

Thank you so much.

Each of your testimonies were so compelling.

And if you didn't think that we are in a state of emergency now regarding EMS and the lives that are being lost

daily because we don't have enough EMS and ambulances on the street because they are not compensated and cannot be retained, then I hope you know it now.

We are in a state of emergency.

Of emergency.

Thank you so much for your testimony.

And I just want to end with this, that we understand this is a difficult problem to solve.

And as a union, it's a pretty interesting place to be when everybody agrees with us.

So this message goes out to OLR, to the mayor's office, to the office of budget, to city council.

The union is here as the answer to your problem.

We are willing to work with anybody to get this done.

And we hope we can get there before more people die.

Thank you.

Thank you so very much.