Is there a doctor on board? Please excuse our inadequate emergency kit

Next time you’re on a plane and hear a voice on the speaker calling for a “doctor on board,” you may want to pre-manage your expectations of the tools at your disposal. Or you may end up having to tell the airline in question they seriously need to update their onboard medical emergency kit. That’s what a surgical oncologist from Boston did earlier this month after finding out, during a mid-flight emergency on a Delta Airlines flight to Portugal, that the red bag handed to her by a flight attendant contained medical tools that fell well below what many would expect from a business that brings millions of passengers a year to and from thousands of destinations worldwide. Dr. Andrea Merrill, who works at the Boston Medical Center, was dismayed to see a manual blood pressure cuff in the kit, along with a disposable stethoscope. "It's hard enough in a regular doctor's office to hear much with those stethoscopes," she said during a interview with Washington, D.C.-based National Public Radio. "So you can imagine, if you're 30,000 feet in the air, it was really impossible to hear anything." Read: What happens after 'Is there a doctor on board?' Dr. Merrill also noted the absence of a glucometer and an EpiPen. The kit did, however, contain epinephrene. Shortly after the flight, she posted a Tweet addressed to Delta that went viral and set off a discussion—with many other physicians chiming in—about what airlines should be putting in their medical emergency kits. A few doctors on Dr. Merrill’s Twitter thread on the subject shared their own experiences about responding to an inflight medical emergency. According to a 2018 article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, one in every 604 flights will see an onboard medical emergency. In the U.S., minimum requirements for emergency medical kits at the time the article was published included an automated external defibrillator, equipment to obtain a basic assessment, hemorrhage control and initiate an intravenous line, and medications to treat basic conditions. A few days after Dr. Merrill first Tweeted about the incident, she posted an update saying Delta had called her and said that as of August 1 it was putting in automated blood pressure cuffs and “real” stethoscopes. Read: Doctors on planes Read: 'OK this is going to be messy': Canadian doctor helps deliver baby mid-flight

Is there a doctor on board? Please excuse our inadequate emergency kit

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