Medical Emergencies

I enjoyed your article "Is There a Doctor on Board? No? Odds Are Still in Your Favor," Travel Insider, June 11]. I think it did a fairly accurate job of describing what happens when there is a serious medical issue on board a commercial flight. However, you neglected to mention the key role of the flight dispatcher, a licensed FAA individual who shares responsibility for every commercial flight and is on staff at every commercial airline. As president of the Professional Airline Flight Control Assn.

To try to improve Los Angeles County's weakened trauma care system, the Board of Supervisors Tuesday asked fire and health officials to look into making greater use of helicopters to transport critically ill patients. The board said it would consider adding a helicopter, at a cost of $1.8 million to $2.8 million, to be used solely for moving accident and crime victims.

Question: On a recent flight from Los Angeles to Shanghai, an older woman passenger collapsed on my lap and then on my feet. The flight crew had to bring an oxygen tank to her. It was terrifying, and I didn't know what to do. If this ever happens again, what should I do? Kevin Orbach Nantong, China Answer: The quick answer is to summon help, stay calm and do what you can, which sounds simple but isn't. What you are required to do, what you can do and what you should do are different questions, so we'll start with the easiest one first.

When the machine swallowed her hand, slicing off one finger and mangling the rest, Tania Wafer's co-workers tried frantically to stop the bleeding as a supervisor dialed 911. Hang on, they told her as she slid in and out of consciousness on the floor of the printing plant. The ambulance will come soon. It didn't. Wafer waited nearly 45 minutes for Los Angeles Fire Department paramedics to arrive because of ongoing problems with the agency's emergency dispatch system. The dismemberment occurred March 7, when a brief equipment failure left dispatchers unable to alert fire stations.

With a painless syringe prick in their upper arms, a Florida family on Friday became the first recipients of tiny computer chip implants that store medical information. Jeff and Leslie Jacobs, along with their 14-year-old son, Derek, had the chips, about the size of a grain of rice, implanted in about a minute under local anesthesia. The family wanted the implants in case of medical emergencies. The implant, called the VeriChip, was designed by Palm Beach-based Applied Digital Solutions Inc.

A Los Angeles mayoral candidate took an early campaign swipe at his leading opponents this week and inadvertently exposed the city Fire Department for publishing misleading performance data. Top brass at the Los Angeles Fire Department on Friday admitted that for years the agency put out data that made it appear that firefighters were arriving at the scene of emergencies faster than they actually were. The dust-up began Thursday, when candidate Austin Beutner complained in an online Huffington Post column that recent Fire Department budget cuts have sent response times for medical emergencies soaring.

In reaction to ongoing controversy over emergency response times, a Los Angeles city councilman on Friday called for full funding to be restored to the Fire Department, whose budget has been slashed by more than 15% over the last three years. The appeal from Councilman Paul Koretz came during a special council committee hearing in which Los Angeles Fire Chief Brian Cummings faced tough questions about how his department measures its responses to calls for help. Koretz said he was dismayed by recent revelations that the department for years overstated how fast it was arriving on the scene of medical emergencies.

The Pan Am flight to San Francisco was about an hour out of London when Dr. Richard Selby, a Santa Ana neurologist, heard a flight attendant ask if there was a physician on board. A man in his 60s had collapsed, unconscious, in the aisle six rows behind Selby. Within seconds, Selby, a British nurse and an emergency room doctor from San Jose, were at the side of the stricken passenger. In examining the cold and clammy man, Selby detected a faint pulse.

After a 1988 management audit rebuking the Los Angeles Fire Department for unacceptably slow response times to medical emergencies, the city's Fire Commission on Thursday approved a plan to revamp the department's emergency medical dispatch system. The department's plan--which includes expanding an experimental ambulance corps staffed by firefighters--met with sharp criticism from the president of the union representing paramedics.

Continuing its search for new revenue, the Los Angeles City Council voted Friday to aggressively pursue unpaid bills for ambulance and emergency medical services--an effort that could raise up to $1.5 million annually. The plan, proposed by San Fernando Valley Councilwoman Laura Chick, calls on the city to spend about $538,000 to hire a team of nine clerks and bill collectors to crack down on delinquent bills for an 18-month trial period.