At least in the USA, “trauma center” has a pretty specific meaning. Those are places to fix bad injuries. In US parlance a Level 1 trauma center is the maximum equipped facility. There’s only a few per US state. They can and will take a shot at fixing anything. If they can’t keep you alive you were doomed anyhow.
My GF is a level 1 trauma OR nurse. They get the burned, bullet-riddled, or mangled bodies, the ones with entrails strung across the floor, one foot and one arm in a ziplock bag, etc. They reinstall or repair what they can, remove what they can’t, and watch the no-hopers die after a good hard try. Every day.
A darn handy facility to have nearby wherever you live, but not a facility relevant to some guy who had a heart attack.
Sure - if you can get them deployed within that few minutes (how long until someone noticed the person was unresponsive?) and IF the problem is fibrillation, which is the only thing they work on. If someone is genuinely flat-line they won’t help.
Babies gonna happen wherever you have people in residence. My old college roommate was in a program where the government paid for her medical education in exchange for her going wherever they told her to go for seven years, and those places were remote - she wound up doing a lot of baby-catching in those years, quite a few on the side of various “roads”, occasionally while waiting for the med-evac chopper to arrive.
A roving OB specialist makes a lot of sense, actually.
One of the things I recall from my very rudimentary 1-hour First Aid course was something along the lines of “don’t stop CPR/first aid until the First Responders arrive to take over.” Similarly, first responders keep working until the doctors take over, and only a doctor can decide the patient is gone. So would the crew have been working him all the way, or would they need a doctor on board (if there was one) to make diaignosis, or are they capable /qualified to determine when to stop attempts at revival?
At least where I worked, nobody on the crew was trained to make the “He’s dead Jim” decision. Any MD passenger might choose to make that declaration. One of our resident MDs would have to weigh in on what that action would look like from their professional / liability perspective.
We also had the services of a dedicated airline industry emergency medicine outfit. And the reliable comms to get them on the phone with our FAs and/or Good Samaritan medics even over the high Arctic. At which point all legal liability transfers to that service and the MDs who work for them. I’d expect any decision to stop treatment for futility to come from those folks based on info they’re receiving from the Samaritan(s). An actual legal declaration of death would probably wait until the “patient” / body has been delivered to a hospital and an ED physician there would be the one to put the sig on the papers that officially ends the person’s life.
I only had one death on board in 34 years and that was at the gate during boarding. Although it seemed obvious to non-expert me that this person was well and truly done, the paramedics showed up promptly, put the non-responsive “patient” on their gurney & into their van and left in a full code.
The recent times I’ve had CPR training, including less than two weeks ago, they’ve stressed that properly done CPR is exhausting, that you can only do what you can do, and all 50 states have Good Samaritan laws.
My nephew the airline pilot once told me the story of the fellow (a passenger) who died in flight. He was pushing 100 apparently. The flight attendants discovered this when they’d landed. His wife (widow) tried to get them to load him on the wheelchair they had provided even though he was dead, to wheel him to his connection. My nephew remarked that the paperwork and hassle would be complicated and expensive (and presumably stressful for the elderly wife) compared to pretending he was alive and seating him on the final leg of his flight and delaing with it at home. But of course, the flight crew could not simply pretend he wasn’t dead.
Fascinating and informative thread. Thanks to all the contributions.
Just wanted to pick up on this:
Seconding the statement, from a passenger perspective. We’ve had several opportunities to fly Turkish and have been impressed every time. They’re genuinely a world-class operation, with friendly people and well-organized services. The Istanbul airport is mind-bogglingly huge, but unlike other big airports with efficiency problems (Boston and Heathrow, I’m looking at you), we generally get through check-in and security in 30 minutes plus or minus. The training and professionalism of airport staff, especially the helpfulness of Turkish staff specifically, are a big part of that.
If I have any complaint about their services, it’s in the structure of their flight network inside the country. There’s extremely limited support for point-to-point travel; they don’t really offer “hopper” type flights from, say, Cappadocia to Izmir, the way you can go from SFO to LAX. If you want to fly Turkish from city to city, your route will frequently require you to go through Istanbul as the hub, even if it seems geographically inefficient. I get why they do it, but it is occasionally annoying. (There are small operators which do support those kinds of flights, but the service quality is night and day.)
So, yeah, I wouldn’t hesitate to fly Turkish. Pretty great airline. Excellent onboard food, too.
There was an incident at a heli-skiing operation I’ve skied with (in that helicopter) where the pilot had a heart attack in flight. Unfortunately, diverting to a different landing is not an option in a small helicopter. 5 out of 7 died, ultimately.
Obviously answer might change by state but when we (EMS) called & the medic spoke to the physician & said this is what we got (& possibly this is what we did) that once the doc said ‘call it’ they were legally & officially dead at that point. They didn’t necessarily go to the ER for the doc to see the body; depending upon circumstances sometimes they went right to the funeral home or sometimes to the coroner’s office. It was rare for us to take a body to a hospital & that was more they died in a public place & we’re just helping to clean up as dead bodies tend to upset people.
Thanks for that. I always have trouble visualizing a great circle route from just the description. That was a lot farther north than i would have figured.
You can easily lay out a a great circle route using Google Maps. Right-click on a start point, select “Measure Distance”, then left-click on an end point. Once you’ve created a ruler, then you can drag the endpoints wherever you like, and the path will adjust while you’re moving each endpoint. Note that flights often deviate significantly from the shortest (great circle) route to seek out tailwinds and avoid headwinds/turbulence (and lately, to also avoid overflying Russian airspace). I’ve flown between Detroit and Japan many times, and while a GC route would take us across central Alaska, our flights to Japan typically pass over Anchorage, and our flights back to Detroit typically run even further south. Although this is a lateral deviation of 300-500 miles from the GC route, it actually only adds about 45 miles to a 6400-mile flight.
Interestingly, there’s a story on our local news this week about a firefighter who died at the fire station. He was found in the sleeping quarters when he didn’t respond to a call.
It seems to me that if there’s one place I’d choose outside of a hospital emergency room to have a medical emergency, it would be a fire station. Sure enough, they started working on him as soon as they found him, and continued to work on him all the way to the hospital, but it was already too late.
It’s amazing how many people ‘die’ between 7-9am. In reality they passed sometime overnight & that’s when their discovered by their partner / family member after that person wakes up & goes to check on the deceased because they haven’t gotten out of bed yet.
What’s the protocol there? Do passengers disembark? Any need to go through security, or do they just corral them while the mounties and sniffer dogs check the plane? How long should that take?
I believe the issue with the Turkish flight would be getting a replacement crew member there, if they landed in Iqaluit. It could mean a layover of 12 or more hours without the facilities for several hundred people.
Apparently - the 211 passengers disembarked to the terminal, and were fed. They had to be re-screened, along with their hand baggage. All checked baggage was unloaded and scanned; then the plane interior was scanned with metal detectors. They said the process would take 3-4 hours.
I can’t find the departing flight (I assume it was the same plane) on flightaware - only the incoming flight which arrived at 05:21 - so I don’t know how long the delay was.
Air India was supposed to depart Iqaluit at 09:15, but the flight was “cancelled”. With no other news - do we assume they are still on the ground there (18:30 EDT Tuesday)?