Frequency and clinical spectrum of in-flight medical incidents during domestic and international flights

Abstract

Most medical practitioners are not specifically trained to diagnose or manage in-flight medical incidents, yet there may occur a moral obligation to do so when least expected. We felt that knowledge of the frequency of emergency versus non-serious medical incidents, in addition to the clinical spectrum of incidents most often encountered, would be of interest to medical practitioners and, in particular, critical care physicians, who happen to find themselves asked to assist with such events. To this end we collaborated with the Department of Medical Services of a major Australian airline to define the incidence, severity, and type of all in-flight medical events encountered over the course of a year’s flights. We audited in-flight medical data collected over a continuous 12-month period, which covered 131,890 international and domestic flight sectors transporting more than 27 million passengers. There was an average of 296 medical events per month (3555 in total) making the per-flight incidence of a medical event approximately 1:40 (2.7%). Of these in-flight incidents, 915 (26%) were graded as emergencies, with the commonest descriptors of such incidents being either loss of consciousness (37%) or a suspected cardiovascular event (12%). Six of these 915 emergencies proved fatal. Twenty-one flights were diverted due to medical incidents (<0.016% of all flights), with 52% of these attributed to suspected cardiac events. In this series, medical in-flight events were recorded in approximately one in 40 flights, whereas medical emergencies occurred in approximately one in 150 flights.