When doctors deal with in-flight emergencies
About halfway through a recent overnight flight from Los Angeles to New York, a call went out on the PA: Is there a doctor on board?
It woke Johnson Lee, a plastic surgeon from Beverly Hills, from a slumber. He soon found himself examining a patient in the galley, who looked “gray and clammy.”
Lee asked a crewmember for the onboard medical equipment.
“The blood pressure cuff they handed me was broken,” he remembers. “I asked them to bring out the automated external defibrillator and hooked up the guy so I can at least monitor some basic vital signs, like heart rate and rhythm. For blood pressure monitoring, I improvised by using my fingers on his neck and wrists.”
Lee stabilized the patient, who survived. A grateful attendant handed him a bag of potato chips.
His is just one of several doctor-on-board stories making the rounds lately. Last year, for example, a medic on an Air China flight used a towel and a spoon to save a passenger having an epileptic seizure. A nurse flying from Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, to Boston performed CPR on a fellow passenger suffering a heart attack, saving his life.
And who can forget the lucky Southwest Airlines passenger traveling from Atlanta to Houston who fell ill on a plane filled with doctors returning from a medical conference? Needless to say, he received the very best care.
A federal law called the Air Carrier Access Act of 1998 offers limited liability protection for physicians and other medical professionals who volunteer their services during in-flight medical emergencies. In such cases, doctors have to be medically qualified, render care in good faith and receive no monetary compensation to be protected under the law.
Even so, medical professionals have good reason to be hesitant offering help. Remember the case of Tamika Cross, the physician who tried to revive an unresponsive male passenger on a Delta Air Lines flight from Detroit back to Houston last year? When Cross offered to render first aid, a flight attendant questioned her credentials and demanded to see her ID. Another passenger eventually helped the ailing man. In response to a viral social media post made by Cross after the incident, Delta changed its policy and will no longer ask for identification from medical personnel.
“Despite the cramped and medically limited conditions at 30,000 feet, most physicians are ready to assist, without question, during an in-flight medical emergency,” says Steven Stack, an emergency medicine physician from Lexington, Ky., and a former president of the American Medical Association (AMA). “But not all circumstances are the same. Physicians must determine if they would positively contribute to the situation.”
Medical volunteers encounter a variety of responses from airlines:
Jeff Levine, a volunteer EMT from Red Hook, N.Y., assisted a passenger on a flight from Tampa to Newburgh, N.Y. “The airline did nothing to say thanks for helping on the flight,” he recalls. “Although several passengers thanked me while I was waiting at the baggage carousel for my bag.”
Kristina Skinner remembers how her father, a fire chief and paramedic, assisted a passenger having a stroke on a flight from Las Vegas to San Francisco. The airline sent him a flight voucher valid for one year.
Pamela Abramson-Levine, a chiropractor from Los Angeles, helped a woman suffering from lower abdominal pain on a flight from Los Angeles to Kuala Lumpur. “I was given a bottle of champagne for my assistance,” she says.
Rather than rewards for these volunteers, airlines should take a few basic steps that could save the lives of passengers.
The AMA has urged airlines to expand the contents of in-flight emergency medical kits and place emergency lifesaving devices onboard commercial passenger aircraft.
Accepting payment for a medical service means medical professionals could lose their liability protection, which is why the association also recommends that doctors turn down any compensation for their volunteer efforts. Knowing you saved a life is perhaps the greatest reward of all.