Tag: EMTs

NEW YORK, NEW YORK - APRIL 05: Emergency medical technician wearing protective gown and facial mask amid the coronavirus pandemic on April 5, 2020 in New York City.

Don’t Call Me a Hero: How to Meaningfully Support Health Care Workers

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Molly Levene

“Heroes Work Here.”

Sometimes those three short words make me angry; other times they make me cry.

I was one among thousands of EMTs and paramedics who were deployed to New York through FEMA last year. Having studied public health in school and worked in EMS for over a year, I thought I had seen the extent to which we fail patients; I believed myself disillusioned enough to be prepared for any injustice or chaos I might encounter.

But last April, I quickly learned I was wrong. And when you feel complicit in such deep structural dysfunction, it is incredibly difficult to feel heroic.

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Governmental immunity for EMTs

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By Alex Stein

According to the recent New York Court of Appeals’ decision—Applewhite v. Accuhealth, Inc., 2013 WL 3185185 (N.Y. 2013)—governmental immunity is a starting point for any inquiry into EMTs’ liability for malpractice.

The Court based this immunity on the famous “duty to all is duty to none” principle: in providing a vital emergency service to public in general, EMTs function in a governmental capacity and owe no duty to any specific individual. The Court explained that EMTs differ from the regular providers of medical care—doctors and nurses, who are subject to stringent licensing requirements and must have extensive educational and training credentials—in that they provide only emergency medical stabilization in Basic (as opposed to Advanced) Life Support ambulances. EMTs are also funded and remunerated differently from doctors and nurses: they operate on a limited municipal budget that depends on the taxpayers’ money and cannot afford malpractice payouts. Dilution of the EMTs’ budget might limit the municipal emergency response systems to mere transport service—a consequence that society can ill-afford. Read More