Happy EMS week

Every time EMS talks about applying pressure, the same crowd shows up.

“The Taylor Law.”

“You’ll get fired.”

“Don’t risk your pension.”

“Just be grateful.”

Bro, we’ve been hearing that for 30 years while EMS stayed at the bottom of the food chain. At some point you have to ask whether that advice actually worked. Uber eats drivers get paid a minimum 23 dollars an hour in nyc, FDNY emts out of the academy make 18.34$. You get paid more to deliver food than patients.

And before somebody comments “you’ll get fired,” let’s be serious for a second. People who are legitimately sick and have legitimate medical documentation are entitled to use the benefits they’ve earned. Public safety agencies have dealt with workforce shortages and attendance issues before. The bigger question is why so many providers feel pushed to their breaking point in the first place.

Meanwhile, healthcare workers across the country have figured out there are other ways to apply pressure. You guys saw this week the “work-to-code” posters showing up at hospitals everywhere.

That means allowing your bus to auto 81.

It means driving with due regard to assignments.

It means not picking up overtime.

It means going out BBP when appropriate.

It means spending time on scene to provide exceptional patient care.

It means trying to adhere to patient requests for out of area destinations and calling telemetry.

It means ensuring your documentation is complete before giving up a refusal.

In other words, it means doing the job exactly the way policy, protocol, and administration say it should be done.

FDNY EMS is already critically understaffed. Response times are climbing, overtime is constant, and vacancies remain difficult to fill.

At a certain point, the threat of mass discipline loses credibility when the system is already struggling to staff ambulances. You can’t replace years of experience overnight, and you certainly can’t replace an entire workforce overnight. Even if they staffed every available EMT and paramedic from fire suppression, they would still be overwhelmed.

EMS isn’t some auxiliary service anymore. It’s an essential part of this city’s emergency response infrastructure. This is the greatest city in the world and there is no reason it should take 18 minutes to respond to a Priority 1, 2, or 3 emergency.

The city depends on EMS providers showing up every day despite chronic staffing shortages, delayed contracts, and wages that continue to lag behind comparable agencies. Emts as Wyckoff and jamaica make more than double of what you make for doing the same job. BLS is making more than your medics.

Whether people agree with labor actions or not, pretending the workforce has no leverage ignores reality. A system that is already stretched thin cannot simply terminate thousands of employees and continue operating as normal.

Y’all saw the signs at every hospital this week

Y’all see voluntary hospital units pulling trucks off the road.

Y’all seem to forget why the merger happened in the first place. FDNY NEEDS EMS transport reimbursements to generate revenue and offset operational costs. We essentially pay for ourselves and break even.

Yet every time somebody talks about change, we’re told to wait. The people telling us to stay quiet are the same people who watched contracts drag on for years, watched pay fall behind, watched staffing collapse, watched response times climb, and somehow still think the solution is to keep doing exactly what we’ve been doing. Let your union condemn publicly about striking, don’t let your union instill fear in you. Some of those same people reminisce about the “old days” where they can ping 89 from across the borough, stay hidden and not run calls all day, who remained complacent their whole careers and once the FDNY actually held EMS responsible they’ve committed too much time and don’t want to strike in fear of losing their pension.

Guys spend years trying to upgrade to fire, leave EMS, move into hospitals, go to nursing school, PA school, medical school, management, or anywhere else they can. For all of you guys who joined this career solely to upgrade to fire and don’t care about the prehospital side of things, your new tier 6 pension time gets reset after you upgrade to fire. Yet somehow we’re supposed to believe the current system is so great that nobody should ever challenge it.

If the job was being treated the way it should be, there wouldn’t be an entire culture built around escaping it.

Fear isn’t a strategy.

Compliance isn’t a strategy.

Hope isn’t a strategy.

FDNY isn’t going to wake up tomorrow and suddenly decide to value EMS because we were extra patient.

Be a part of the change you want to see.

Do something about it, Happy EMS week.