Shortly after her 14-year-old son, Kevin, arrived at school on Sept. 28, Jennifer Daly received a call from the nurse’s office. Kevin was feeling weak, and one of his eyes was blurry.
Ms. Daly, who owns a day care in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens, headed to the school, and the nurse called an ambulance.
As Ms. Daly was stuck in traffic, the nurse called 911 again and said Kevin might be having a stroke. Ms. Daly’s husband, a retired New York City firefighter, called 911 too.
Ms. Daly got to the school roughly an hour after the call, and the ambulance still had not arrived. She took her son to the hospital herself. Medical tests confirmed he had, in fact, had a stroke.
On Tuesday, Ms. Daly told her story, which was earlier reported by WABC-TV, to the City Council during an hourslong hearing about the troubling rise in the city’s emergency response times.
“It’s kind of sickening, because they should have availability for things like this,” she said in an interview after the hearing.
It is now taking 41.2 percent longer for ambulances to respond to life-threatening emergencies than it did a decade ago and more than twice as long for non-life-threatening emergencies, according to a recent report by the New York City comptroller. Response times for life-threatening emergencies took almost as long as response times did for non-life-threatening emergencies in 2015.
“It is apparent to anyone paying attention that our city has struggled to meet its obligations to provide timely emergency medical care to all New Yorkers,” said Joann Ariola, the chair of the Council Committee on Fire and Emergency Management.
No one contested her assessment.
“The department is currently engaged in a challenging period of increasing response times,” said John Esposito, the Fire Department’s chief of department. “We know this is unacceptable, and we are working tirelessly to reverse this trend.”
Both Fire Department officials and union officials said that lagging worker pay has created a retention and recruitment problem. While the department has a budget for 4,500 emergency medical service workers, it only employs about 4,000, Mr. Esposito said.
Entry-level emergency medical technicians earn only $44,000 — less than entry-level sanitation workers, firefighters, correction workers and police officers. By their fifth year in service, an emergency medical technician earns a base pay of $69,000, compared with more than $100,000 for the majority of uniformed workers.
“We believe solving the pay issue is the first step to getting everything back on track,” Mr. Esposito said.
The unions representing emergency medical workers are negotiating with the mayor’s office over their contract, which lapsed in 2022. But city budget experts worry that any sizable pay increase would set a precedent for other union contracts that the city might be unable to afford.
“The Mamdani administration is committed to ensuring our emergency medical personnel have the staffing, compensation and resources they need to do their jobs effectively and to delivering the timely care New Yorkers deserve,” said Sam Raskin, a spokesman for the mayor.
In the meantime, stories about slow emergency responses accumulate.
On Oct. 3, a 16-year-old boy was playing basketball at a middle school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side when he broke his leg. A bystander called 911 at 4:10 p.m., according to a letter sent Friday to the fire commissioner by Julie Menin, the City Council speaker in whose district the incident occurred.
By 4:40 p.m., the teenager’s father had arranged for a private ambulance to take his son to the hospital. At 6:54 p.m., the Fire Department called the bystander to ask if the child still needed an ambulance.
The teenager suffered a fractured tibia and fibula; his father did not respond to requests for comment.
In the case of Kevin Daly, the 911 system was experiencing a heavy call load, and the call was never properly classified or triaged by the emergency medical service, according to Fire Department officials.
Rather, it was processed by someone handling “overflow” calls. The official categorizing the call relied on information from the Police Department, and the case was classified as an “unknown condition.”
Fire Department officials said they were working on improving communications with the Police Department.
The emergency system is also dealing with high call volumes and fewer hospitals capable of receiving patients.
On average, more than 90 ambulances are out of service every day, largely because of staffing issues, Paul Miano, the department’s chief of emergency medical service operations, testified.
Since 2003, 19 hospitals have closed in New York City, which forces ambulances to travel longer to find medical facilities, Mr. Esposito said. It also means that the number of ambulances that private hospitals contribute to the emergency response system has fallen.
The ambulance fiasco affecting the Daly family had some silver linings.
The tentative diagnosis of a stroke was accurately made at the school by Ms. Daly’s daughter, who was summoned to her brother’s aid over the school’s loudspeaker, and recalled what she had learned in a first aid course.
And Kevin is now doing fine. In the interview, his parents said his left eye continues to lag his right eye, but doctors expect that will improve over time.
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