Trains powered by electricity rather than diesel fuel are not scheduled to begin rolling on the MBTA’s Fairmount Line for years, but public officials are so excited about the now-concrete plans for more frequent service with less pollution …
Massachusetts
After road rage incident in Tewksbury, police searching for masked suspect
Police are searching for a person who may have shown a gun during a road rage incident Tuesday in Tewksbury, Massachusetts.
There were few details about the incident immediately available, including whether anyone was hurt. The person, believ…
‘Is the ambulance coming?’ What happens when EMS crews can’t respond
This January, a mom dialed 911 when her daughter stopped breathing, but there was no ambulance available to help.
“I just kept asking, ‘What’s going on? Is she breathing? Is the ambulance coming?’” Andrea Feeley recalls of the moments after her 2-year-old daughter, Yuna, slumped over on the couch and stopped breathing.
Fire crews from the town of Winthrop, Massachusetts, responded within minutes, but the two ambulances in town, contracted through Action Ambulance, were tied up on other calls, sitting at emergency rooms waiting with patients miles away. The situation became more urgent as time ticked away.
The fire chief put Yuna in the back of his SUV and rushed to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston with firefighter EMTs performing CPR along the way. They arrived at the hospital 23 minutes after the initial call for help. Yuna didn’t survive.
The girl deserved “an ambulance and paramedics who could have possibly done more,” Feeley says.
It’s an example of what’s playing out in EMS services across Massachusetts because the system is stressed. Some in the industry call the moment when there’s a critical need for an ambulance but no crew is available to respond “Level Zero,” and it’s happening more often across Massachusetts.
“Our largest worry is that those truly life-threatening cases, we might not have a resource available,” said Michael Woronka, the president and CEO of Action Ambulance.
The NBC10 Investigators embedded with Action Ambulance and witnessed the challenges to fill the critical need firsthand. On a weekday afternoon, emergency crews were scrambling, responding to call after call.
They again hit Level Zero, which Woronka explained meant that, if someone called 911 within minutes, it would “be a waiting game in terms of who has a resource to potentially send” for help.
At the same time as Winthrop is at Level Zero, there are also no ambulances available in Revere, the city next door. Revere in fact had a 911 call and called Winthrop for help with mutual aid. Two municipalities had no ambulances at the same time.
But the EMS system is taxed across the state. On this day, on the South Shore, ambulances are stacked up at Good Samaritan Hospital waiting for patients to be seen. In Boston, data we obtained shows response times are slowly creeping up, and the number of calls have increased 20% in three years, with fewer EMTs on the road.
A call goes out for an elderly man in Hampden, but there’s no ambulance available. In Pittsfield, a Level Zero was declared.
Staffing issues and overcrowded emergency rooms are part of the problem, according to Dr. Robbie Goldstein, the commissioner of the Department of Public Health, which oversees the Emergency Medical System in the Massachusetts. Wait times at emergency rooms cause ambulances to wait, which keeps the ambulances off the road.
“It’s tragic and it’s horrible and we have to fix the system because we can’t not answer the call,” he said.
In fact, the Office of Emergency Medical Services found this May that the “taxed” system left no ambulances available to respond in Yuna’s death on Jan. 26. Action Ambulance followed policies and procedures correctly, and members of the Winthrop Fire Department tried to meet up with another ambulance that answered the mutual aid call, but it was too late.
Woronka, of Action Ambulance and a first responder for 38 years, said low pay — impacted by a pay structure that only reimburses ambulances for patients being transported and not the care they receive — and an increase in the number of calls are also having an impact.
“The entire system,” he said, “it’s not just at a breaking point. It is breaking as we are watching this unfold in front of us right now.”
Yuna’s mother is calling for to change that system, saying it “shouldn’t have happened” that no one was there to help when she dialed 911.
“It could have been the difference of saving her life,” Feeley said.
Two-day stretch of sunny, low humidity weather in New England before chance of showers
Welcome to a two-day stretch of amazing weather. Temperatures Tuesday reach the 70s to 80s with a late sea breeze.
A few clouds develop, but everyone remains dry with low humidity. Tuesday night’s lows again fall to the 60s and 50s in su…
Search continues for people in deadly Dorchester shooting
Boston police are still searching for the people behind a deadly shooting in the city’s Dorchester neighborhood.
The shooting occurred at about 6:30 p.m. Monday inside of a triple-decker home on Trent Street, according to police.
When…
Brockton Hospital reopens Tuesday after massive 2023 fire
A fire destroyed Signature Healthcare Brockton Hospital in 2023, forcing it to close. Now, more than a year later, its doors are reopening with some improvements for patients.
While the hospital was closed, patients had to be treated at other area hospitals, which meant they had to spend up to 36 hours sometimes to get seen. Now that Signature Health is reopening Tuesday, patients can expect shorter wait times.
NBC10 Boston was given a preview of the renovations Monday, including the lobby and the emergency department, featuring a 12-bed mental health triage unit. There’s also a new outpatient surgical facility.
Roughly 900 employees will be staffing the hospital, that’s three-fourths of the staffing levels the hospital had before the electrical fire in February 2023.
They’re hoping to add 300 more employees once the maternity, pediatric and behavioral health units re-open by the end of the year.
“We created these three tenets that we’ve lived by since then, and so one was to care for our employees, which I think we did the best we could. One was to continue to serve this community in any capacity that we could without a hospital, and the third was to open as quickly as possible,” said Bob Haffey, Signature Healthcare president and CEO.
The hope is that they can start serving the roughly 60,000 patients they used to see every year and lift the burden on the other hospitals.
Signature Healthcare said they’ve been around for 125 years and would like to see 125 more.
