ALBANY — The man had been talking to the ambulance crew almost the whole way in. A torn artery in his leg had been bleeding profusely, but the paramedics had slowed it, and he was awake. Then, a few blocks from Albany Medical Center Hospital, he lost consciousness. Doctors gave him a blood transfusion the moment he arrived, but it was too late.
“Had he gotten that blood 15 or 20 minutes earlier on the way to the hospital, I think he’d be home with his family right now,” said Dr. Warren Hayashi, an emergency physician at the hospital and a medical director for Colonie Emergency Medicine Services.
That blood is exactly what New York paramedics still cannot carry. Transfusing blood has long been the job of clinicians like doctors and nurses, not the medics who reach patients first. After more than a year of advocacy, Gov. Kathy Hochul in September 2024 signed a bill into law that added paramedics to that list, letting ground ambulance services carry blood products and administer them to patients “in hemorrhagic shock.”…