‘NYC doesn’t heart you’: 80% of New Yorkers who suffer cardiac arrest die due to slow FDNY response
Four out of five New Yorkers who go into cardiac arrest die as the FDNY’s response times to medical emergencies continue to soar.
City firefighters and medics revived just 20% of all cardiac-arrest patients during the fiscal year ending June 30, the worst success rate since the FDNY began documenting the statistic more than a decade ago, according to the annual Mayor’s Management Report.
“It’s absolutely shocking to learn that four out of five cardiac-arrest calls in New York City end in the death of a patient,” Andrew Ansbro, president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, told The Post.
“New York City needs to address the ever-increasing response times and volume of calls with more resources for the FDNY. We are responding to more life-threatening calls than ever before, slower than we have ever been, and the results are far too often fatal.
“The FDNY needs to figure out why we can’t get fire trucks and ambulances there fast enough, and we need to reverse this trend,” Ansbro added. “We’re talking about literally thousands of lives lost every year . . . and survivability is directly related to response times.”
For a third straight fiscal year, FDNY firefighters and medics took longer to get to medical emergencies.
Combined response times by FDNY ambulances and fire companies to “life-threatening medical emergencies” were 10 minutes and three seconds in FY 2024, up 13 seconds, or 2.2%, compared to the previous 12 months.
Cardiac cases not treated with CPR in eight minutes usually end in death, and brain damage is common if untreated after five minutes, experts say.
Survival for cardiac arrest patients could be as high as 90% if treated within the first minutes.
FDNY medics and firefighters responded to 633,361 “life-threatening medical emergencies” — including 30,038 cardiac arrests or choking incidents — in fiscal 2024, according to the MMR. In fiscal 2019, they handled 567,757 and 26,231, respectively.
Response times have jumped because the number of emergency calls are up, staffing is short and resources strained, the head of the union representing city EMTs and paramedics said.
Meanwhile, City Hall’s anti-car agenda has narrowed more streets and changed traffic patterns, slowing down drivers — including first responders, added Oren Barzilay, president of Local 2507 of District Council 37.
“Our men and women do amazing heroic work every day,” Barzilay, said. “However, we are stretched thin. . . . More resources and personnel are the only solutions at this time.”
The 20% cardiac-arrest revival rate is “alarming,” he said.
The bleak cardiac-arrest survival rate comes as the FDNY this past year changed how it measured revivals.
The department shifted to a “national standard,” which counts success as “the sustained return of spontaneous circulation” — or steady heartbeats — for patients upon arrival at hospitals, rather than the previous metrics that boosted numbers by counting all cases where “spontaneous circulation” returned.
Success rates under the old metrics were as high as 35% in FY 2019 but dropped to 28% by FY 2023.
The latest MMR recalculates the fiscal 2023 statistics using the current “national standard” method — making 2023’s survival rate the same dismal 20% rate as FY 2024.
FDNY spokeswoman Amanda Farinacci Gonzalez said the city’s survival rate is comparable to the national average for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest patients.
She also said “responding to New Yorkers in need is a top priority of the FDNY, which is why we recently announced several initiatives to help decrease response times — including hospital liaison officers, paramedic response units, increased access to telehealth and raising awareness of when to call 911.”
“In recent years, EMS has experienced an explosion in call volume, including in the number of high-priority calls, as well as an increase of transports to the hospital,” she added.
