BRONX TIMES
By Emily Swanson | February 5, 2026
The Bronx is dying for better medical care. Few people know this better than Erika Perrotta.
Perotta, 30, is a Montefiore emergency department nurse who grew up three blocks from the Moses Campus, located at 111 East 210th St. — and is one of the 15,000 New York State Nurses Association members currently on strike from Montefiore, Mount Sinai and NewYork-Presbyterian.
A Montefiore nurse for almost two years, Perrotta told the Bronx Times that when she graduated from nursing school in 2024, she immediately applied to work at Montefiore, where many of her family members seek care and live nearby. “This is my neighborhood. I wanna be in this area.”
In daily rallies as the strike enters week four, Perrotta and others have called attention to chronic overcrowding in the Montefiore emergency room, which is among the top five busiest in the country, with approximately 275,000 visits annually across its adult facilities.
The lack of space in one of the borough’s most prominent hospitals is but one symptom of the health crisis facing the 1.4 million residents who call the Bronx home.
An analysis by amNewYork and the Bronx Times found that on multiple ranking systems, the quality and safety of most Bronx hospitals rate low-to-middling, at best.
Hospitals in the Bronx saw that emergency medical services (EMS) response times are the slowest of the five boroughs. The Bronx is also ranked as the unhealthiest of the state’s 62 counties.
The problem of care in the Bronx is complex, but not due to a lack of hospital facilities. The borough is served by 10 distinct emergency departments, compared to 14 in Brooklyn, 13 in Manhattan and nine in Queens. Still, over the last quarter-century, the Bronx lost 12% of staffed hospital beds, according to a February 2025 report by the nonprofit Community Service Society.
Getting to a hospital via ambulance is also a major problem. The city’s EMS workforce is in full-blown crisis, according to its union, Local 2507, which says EMS is responding to more emergencies with fewer staffed ambulances, leading to longer wait times that can — and have — cost patients their lives
For the life-or-death problem of slow response times, serious workforce issues are to blame, according to Oren Barzilay, president of Local 2507, the union representing 4,000 emergency medical technicians (EMTs), paramedics and fire inspectors in NYC.
Last fall, the union launched a campaign, Stand with EMS, calling attention to the fact that 70% of employees resign within the first five years and earn $18.94 per hour before taxes — putting their wages behind those of most dog walkers, babysitters and department store gift wrappers.
These wages are unworkable to any NYC resident but especially grievous to EMS workers who perform difficult, dangerous work where every second counts.
For instance, if a person suffers a severed major artery, they can bleed to death in as little as two minutes. In sudden cardiac arrest, irreversible brain damage begins in as little as four minutes, and survival is unlikely if effective CPR is not started within 10 minutes, according to the union.
Past 11 minutes without EMS help, ”You might as well take them to the morgue or funeral home,” said Barzilay.
So why is the Bronx so slow? The problem isn’t traffic, distance or a lack of ambulances and hospital facilities — it still comes back to the workforce problem and the lack of a proper wage for EMTs, according to Barzilay.
“It doesn’t take much time to realize they could be making more money working at McDonald’s, Uber or dogwalking,” he said