BY ALINE REYNOLDS | Last year’s closure of St. Vincent’s hospital has not increased the time it takes for an ambulance to get to a victim on the Lower West Side. This promising bit of information was little assurance to neighborhood residents, though, who are demanding a new full-service hospital that, like St. Vincent’s, would both admit and treat all emergency care patients.
Thanks to new technology, personnel training and cutting-edge life support techniques, the Fire Department of New York’s Emergency Medical Service has maintained an average response time of 5.5 minutes to Lower West Side emergencies for the last three years. Despite the shuttering of St. Vincent’s, according to E.M.S. Chief Abdo Nahmod, that figure has not changed. E.M.S. personnel can perform life-saving functions inside its ambulances with advanced life support techniques, Nahmod noted, and the service can assign as many as four emergency vehicles to an emergency call, if necessary.
The new initiatives have increased cardiac arrest patients’ chance of survival from 20 percent to 40 percent, Nahmod told Community Board 2’s Environment, Public Safety and Public Health Committee during a presentation last Wed., July 20.
“The survival rate has gone dramatically up with having more hands on the chest, as well as using advanced therapy,” said Nahmod.
Emergency vehicle stations are scattered throughout Manhattan, said the chief, to accommodate the urgent care needs of each neighborhood. Another ambulance dispatch station at 23rd Street, beneath the Highline, is scheduled to open in late August.
Many community members that attended the meeting, however, were not comforted by Nahmod’s presentation. West Village resident Evette Stark-Katz and others were itching to know the average time it takes for the ambulances to transport seriously ill patients to a hospital and the amount of wait time involved once the patients arrive at the hospital.
No matter the effectiveness of the city’s E.M.S., it can’t duplicate the emergency care provided by a hospital’s fully equipped trauma center, according to Stark-Katz, who was recently arrested for demonstrating in support of a new, full-service hospital in the former St. Vincent’s O’Toole building.
“The time it takes to get to somebody who’s in trouble… is not necessarily the criteria,” said Stark-Katz. “It’s the time it takes to get to the hospital that’s important. If [the ambulance] is stuck behind a garbage truck or caught in a bottleneck, that person is going to die.”
“I think that there’s been a lot of confusion in the nomenclature tonight,” said Jayne Hertko, who demanded a public forum to discuss the transport time figures. “[Those] numbers have to be significantly greater than they were before.”
The F.D.N.Y. measures its emergency response by the time it takes to get to the victim’s location from the time the E.R. service received the 9-1-1 call — not the time it takes to transport the victim to a hospital, Nahmod explained.
“We bring the advanced life support to your doorstep,” he said.
Nahmod hadn’t prepared the transport time data, but said he’d gladly compile it and send it the C.B. 2 following the meeting. As for the wait time at the hospital, once the patient arrives at the Emergency Room, he or she is no longer the F.D.N.Y.’s responsibility.
C.B. 2 member Frieda Bradlow sided with Nahmod, calling the community’s negative reaction to his presentation “misplaced” and “unproductive.”
“Like everyone else, I feel that a community as large as ours needs a full-service hospital,” she said. “But people forget that when E.M.S. responds, treatment actually begins.”
Nahmod didn’t want to postulate on the emergency services provided at the health center poised to replace St. Vincent’s, which is slated to be the city’s first freestanding emergency department. The E.M.S. team, he said, has no say in the type of care center, if any, will open up there.
“We, the New York City E.M.S. system, don’t control if a hospital is there or not there,” saidNahmod. “We simply take the person to the destination that they choose, or the most appropriate destination, based on the acuity and what’s wrong with them.”
Community members, however, were seeking greater assurance that the proposed emergency department would serve the neighborhood’s urgent care needs, particularly since traffic and other logistical hassles has made it difficult for ambulances to transport area patients to hospitals on the East Side and elsewhere since last year.
“St. Vincent’s was the main trauma hospital at that time. Without it, the transport time cross-town and downtown is impossible,” said Eileen Dunn, president of the nurse’s association at St. Vincent’s and a registered nurse there for 25 years.
The chief acknowledged the need for an emergency care facility on the Lower West Side towards the end of his presentation. For the time being, the F.D.N.Y., he said, is taking the necessary measures to “adapt to the void that exists.”
“You’re all absolutely right… It’s the west side that becomes a little bit of a geographical nightmare [for ambulances],” Nahmod said. “We support every initiative to serve the community, including building another hospital.”
