Critics of the city’s emergency services took their horror stories to the D.C. Council on Thursday in hearings that could lead to a fundamental overhaul of the department.
Some activists are outraged by an ambulance service they say is slow to respond to emergencies and ambulance staff who treat patients with contempt.
Council Judiciary Committee Chair Phil Mendelson, D-at large, said the hearing could lead to a fundamental restructuring of the D.C. Fire and Emergency Medical Service.
Some witnesses testified in favor of separating the ambulance service from the fire department. Others advocated for treating each call as if it were a critical-care run.
Monica Yin, a Northwest resident, told council members that she nearly died because paramedics refused to treat a 2002 brain aneurysm seriously, telling a friend that she was “faking it.”
Four years later, after she fell down in front of her home and hit her head, a paramedic refused to take her to the hospital until she gave her name. He also rifled through her purse and cut her shirt off, Yin said.
“It didn’t seem like a practice that was civilized,” Yin said Thursday.
Yin, 54, said she was lucky that she could speak for herself.
She said she was also speaking for Cassandra Bailey, 39, who died after waiting more than an hour — and three desperate 911 calls — for an ambulance to come to her dialysis clinic; and for David Rosenbaum, 63, the retired New York Times journalist who died earlier this year after a mugging. Paramedics thought he was drunk.
D.C. Fire and EMS spokesman Alan Etter said critics are seizing on a few bad examples.
“With 170,000 calls each year, inevitably one or two could have been done better,” Etter said. “We take these things very seriously.”
D.C. ambulance staff
» 235 paramedics
» 1,425 emergency medical technicians
