Blizzard’s Flaky 911 Calls
What is your emergency? My kid didn’t do his homework!
Hundreds of crackpot callers tied up overworked EMS units and swamped the 911 system with frivolous calls during the Christmas-weekend blizzard and its snowy aftermath, worsening a deadly backlog of 1,300 jobs, medics told The Post.
A druggie from Brooklyn dialed the emergency operator Monday at 8 a.m., the height of post-storm chaos, to report difficulty breathing — prompting dispatchers to code it as a critical call.
What he really wanted was for paramedics to transport him down impassable streets to his preferred Flatbush methadone clinic.
Another EMS unit got called to a family home in Brooklyn for a sick kid — but it turned out the parents’ primary complaint was that their son wouldn’t do his homework. They hoped the EMTs could force him to finish it.
Other crazy calls included one from a Bronx man with stomach pains who eventually admitted to medics that “he’d eaten a pizza with everything on it about 20 minutes ago,” said one EMT. The patient needed antacids.
One Brooklyn EMS crew got bogged down by a mom who dialed 911 at about 10 p.m. Sunday to report that her 2-year-old daughter was bleeding from the mouth.
Paramedics raced to the scene to discover the tiny tot had taken a minor tumble and suffered a cut lip.
A Staten Island resident waiting two hours for a bus called 911 because “he was freezing,” an EMS worker said.
Crews showed up to the stop on Bradley Avenue, and the man wanted to sit in the ambulance and warm up, the worker said. Crews said they could only take him to a hospital, but he refused.
Another caller stubbed his toe and told EMTs “it’s been hurting for over an hour.”
There was even a call for difficulty breathing that turned out to be a young Brooklynite who had a stuffy nose.
“He kept complaining to us that he could only breathe out of one nostril,” said an EMT, who estimated about 25 percent of the 911 calls he handled over the three days of the storm were “for absolute b.s.”
Frank Dwyer, a spokesman for the FDNY, which runs the EMS system, says it’s hard for dispatchers to assess a person’s true medical condition over the phone.
“When you have that many calls, not every one is going to be cardiac arrest,” he acknowledged. “But it’s tough for us to say beforehand that that person should stay home.”
A backlog of emergency calls built up overnight on Sunday, Dec. 26, as nearly two feet of snow got dumped on the city, and by the following morning city officials were begging residents to reserve 911 for life-threatening situations.
stretcher shlepper
One of the biggest problems EMT’s face is that they cannot legally refuse someone an ambulance, and that accounts for some of the tie ups in our 911 system. Instead, we say such things as “Are you sure you want to go to the hospital and wait all night in the busy emergency room for that small rash, or would you rather make an appointment with your doctor?”
Hatzuhla seems to have a little more leeway in this area. They are able to transport people to a Physicians office (unlike ems where we can only transport to a 911 receiving hospital) or sometimes even take the patient back to their own home (e.g. the patient called while shopping). I’m not clear on the reason for this, but it does occur frequently.
If ems had the power to tell someone their current complaint or the reason they called does not warrant or justify an ambulance transport to the hospital, there would be many more ambulances available for legitimate emergencies and of course that would bring the response time to roughly two to four minutes down from the current six to eight.
just my 2c
Doctor
They should be able to charge the patient for anything determined to be non life threatening or not a true emergency. This could even be decided by the er docs. That would eliminate many bogus calls.