A long trail of links led me to a shocking story about the death of a baby on a flight to India:

Minutes from landing at the Indira Gandhi International Airport on June 17, Krishnamoorthy and Sujata Mohan noticed that their four-and-a-half-month-old baby, Aditya, had stopped suckling. He was declared dead on arrival.

Aditya’s parents’ have posted a detailed account of what happened on flight 229, and started an online petition, in an effort to “ensure that no other parent ever suffers through the ordeal of seeing their baby die in their hands while in an aircraft”:

As a parent, I will continue to re-live Aditya’s final moments, asking myself if I could have done anything different to save the life of our child. I will never be able to forgive myself for not having acted differently, whatever that action could have been. Similarly, I want Jet Airways and authorities to conduct a more thorough investigation of the above and other aspects and provide me the answers.

As a parent, I was left stunned.  Frankly, I have no idea how I would’ve reacted if any thing like this were to ever happen to me!  The least I can do, as a responsible citizen and parent of two, is bring up the subject for discussion on this blog.

Veeresh Malik, narrating his own near-fatal experience in a comment on the same post, made a cogent argument:

Cabincrew are increasingly, especially with private airlines in India, selected for their looks and appearance. Beyond a very basic St. John’s Ambulance/Red Cross First Aid Course, they get hardly any training in medical treatment…

What do these multi billion dollar airplanes have?  Zilch. A lady in a tight skirt who would not know a stroke or heart attack if it happened in front of her in spades and buckets… even a ferry crossing the English Channel in a few hours – has a full medical staff on board.

Now, I don’t know about young Aditya’s medical history, his parents’ level of basic health knowhow or the doctors’ credentials who checked on the little baby during the flight and on landing.  But, from my perspective, the post and the comments that followed, sowed the seeds for some difficult questions to be asked of ourselves:

* How informed should we, as passengers, be on matters of safety in a flight?

* How much should newbie parents know about health and safety issues, when travelling with infants?

* What should we expect from airlines/airports as the minimum standard of medical facilities?

As a Quality and Process Management professional, I also cannot help but wonder at the sheer criticality of designing a suitable process to handle such a crisis.  If the people who laid down the current policies and procedures knew what Aditya Mohan’s parents had to face, would they do any thing differently?

Once again, I am reminded of the importance of self-empowerment through self-awareness: Matters of health and safety are just too significant to be left to airlines, airports or even (in some cases) medical practitioners! 

As I keep reminding my friends and family, we spend more time and energy researching the next mobile phone or LCD TV we’re thinking of buying, than we do learning how to identify a heart attack or a stroke!

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