B737-800
Flight Crew Air Transport Pilot (ATP)
Flight Crew Last 90 Days 215
Communication Breakdown; Training / Qualification
Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural Published Material / Policy; Flight Deck / Cabin / Aircraft Event Illness / Injury
General None Reported / Taken
Human Factors
These [medical issue ground communication] events rarely go well from a Cabin standpoint. Whatever training or emphasis Inflight puts on this training isn't working. More times than not the flight deck has to interject themselves into the process to make it work. On this flight three of the four Flight Attendants didn't think a call was necessary. The fourth F/A insisted. She ran the call. It was bad from the start. She didn't inform the A F/A that a medical call was being made. Didn't know where the jacks were; communications were atrocious. At one point when we finally were able to get her to understand she needed to talk to the Dr.; she keyed the MIC and talked for two minutes straight telling the story of the event. It only stopped when the flight deck keyed up the MIC and interrupted her and told her to stop talking. She seemed unable to grasp the difference from information the Dr. would need and completely irrelevant information. This was a non-emergency event by all accounts. The passenger was awake; alert; and said he felt fine after a juice and snack. If it had been critical this could have ended much differently. As it was; I instructed another F/A to take over towards the end. Anecdotally the F/As are not adequately trained to use the headset. They aren't adequately trained to understand the basics of radio communication. They don't talk loud enough. They don't understand the basic information the Dr. will want. They overstate the qualifications of Medical Personnel who are helping. In our case we had a ski resort medic. She repeatedly referred to him as 'Dr'. We are going to hurt someone. This was the worst medical call that I have ever witnessed. It was an embarrassment; and if it had been an actual crisis; a lot of time was wasted. We have to do better.
B737-800 Captain reported the flight attendants did not seem to be adequately trained to properly utilize ground medical resources.