Inflight Medical Emergencies: How MD ONBOARD Enables Crew To Consult With Health Professionals

MD ONBOARD is a firm that provides airlines with contractual access to aviation-trained medical emergency specialists to help address inflight medical emergencies. Recently, Simple Flying had the honor of interviewing MD ONBOARD’s Chief Executive Officer, Grant Jeffery, to discuss how the company works.

Connect to the medical team trained in aerospace medicine

As Jeffery shared with Simple Flying, MD ONBOARD is a direct service for airlines to connect both pilots and cabin crew to a “medical team [that is] trained in aerospace medicine.” As such, the MD ONBOARD medical team has:

“A good understanding of the effects of altitude on the human body and the physiology of flight is quite important when dealing with medical situations.”

The medical team includes paramedics who understand cabin crew and their situation and can be backed up by emergency physicians when necessary. It helps that MD ONBOARD operates out of Northwell Health, New York State’s largest health system, as it can tap into the deep and long experience and licensing of medical professionals there. But how does MD ONBOARD help aircrew?

How MD ONBOARD helps aircrew make medical decisions

One of the things that MD ONBOARD can help airline personnel with is making the difficult decision of whether or not a passenger is fit to fly. MD ONBOARD, according to its website, helps with those decisions by considering:

• The health of the passenger(s) or aircrew
• Airline policies for crew and passengers alike
• ACAA and local regulations regarding the rights of passengers

These decisions are difficult in the best of times, with emotions and liability running high, and having medical expertise on-call can be helpful to the gate agents and/or flight attendants who must make the “fit-to-fly” boarding decision. It’s not like most airports have medical personnel on hand, so MD ONBOARD provides that medical professional via teleconference to the airline employees.

Jeffery suggested to Simple Flying that another way MD ONBOARD can help is when a passenger is suffering from a suspected stroke or an injury from turbulence. MD ONBOARD staff can help aircrew find the right airport with the closest appropriate medical facility. As the MD ONBOARD website explains:

“Our paramedics and physicians represent diverse medical specialties to best address the diversity and particularity of onboard health events. And all of them are experienced telemedical specialists—focally trained in the delivery of diagnostic and therapeutic counsel over the telemedical channel. This empowers them to expertly guide crews through appropriate protocols, form recommended courses of action, and help make informed decisions, including—crucially—on the need to divert or not.”

Additionally, the MEBAA Show shared this interview with MD ONBOARD’s Chief Growth Officer, Wehda El Aridi, on YouTube. El Aridi shows off the connectivity of the MD ONBOARD mobile app, as well as some of the company’s training aids, which are used to train airline crew.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPBanaCQWfQ&t=6s

Sometimes, the most appropriate medical facility will be at the flight’s destination, while at other times, a diversion is necessary. Air traffic that can delay landing, the distance between the airport and the hospital, and the hospital’s capacity to provide care are all factors to be considered.

Aware of what equipment is onboard

MD ONBOARD also checks what medical equipment is onboard the aircraft. According to Jeffery, MD ONBOARD recommends what medications and medical equipment each airliner should carry, from first aid kits to Automated External Defibrillators (AEDs). In other words, MD ONBOARD provides medical consulting beyond inflight emergencies so that aviation remains the safest travel method, even if you are on a multi-hour flight.

CEO Jeffery also shared with Simple Flying that MD ONBOARD also supports business and private aviation. As such, MD ONBOARD provides not only the services above, but also medical training for private flight attendants and pilots. Business aviation is a good secondary market for MD ONBOARD.

MD ONBOARD is about a ‘course of treatment’

We’ll let CEO Grant Jeffery’s explanation of MD ONBOARD’s core mission be our last word here. He states that:

“A course of treatment that the [cabin crew] can undertake to make the passenger comfortable while they continue to destination, or in the event that there is something severe, [the MD ONBOARD staff] will provide recommendations to the crew on what to administer. So it could be anaphylactic shock, and they might recommend using the EpiPen. It could be a suspected heart attack, so you may need to get ready to administer [care], for example. So that’s the purpose of the service we offer.”

All in all, passengers hoping that every airline has physicians and paramedics on call will be glad to hear that that is effectively what MD ONBOARD provides.

This article was Originally Published by Simple Flying