Story at a glance
- A doctor and three nurses aboard an April 28 flight to Hawaii helped a Utah woman deliver a baby.
- The group was able to stabilize the baby, Raymond, for three hours until the flight landed, and the newborn was then transported to Kapiolani Medical Center for Women & Children.
- Glenn and the nursing team were able to visit the woman and the infant on Friday.
A doctor and three nurses aboard an April 28 flight to Hawaii helped a Utah woman deliver a baby.
Lavinia Mounga was traveling on vacation from Utah to Hawaii on board on the same flight as Dale Glenn, a Hawaii Pacific Health family physician and three neonatal nurses, Lani Bamfield, Amanda Beeding and Mimi Ho, when she went into labor at 29 weeks. Mounga did not know she was pregnant.
“About halfway through the flight, there was an emergency call, and I’ve experienced this before and usually they’re pretty clear asking if there is a doctor on board,” Glenn said in a press release from Hawaii Pacific Health.
“This call was not like this and it was fairly urgent. I let the flight attendant know that I’m a physician and she said we have a woman having a baby, so I hurried over to see what I could do,” Glenn added.
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The neonatal nurses on the flight were trained to deliver premature babies and were already assisting Mounga when Glenn arrived, according to the release.
“We were about halfway through the flight and we heard someone call out for medical help,” Bamfield said. “I went to see what was going on and see her there holding a baby in her hands, and it’s little.”
Glenn described how “lucky” it was for Mounga that three trained nurses with specialized skills for her exact need were on the same flight.
“The great thing about this was the teamwork. Everybody jumped in together and everyone helped out,” he said. “We didn’t have the usual tools found in a neonatal intensive care unit, so there were a lot of vital signs we couldn’t track.”
The group was able to stabilize the baby, Raymond, for three hours until the flight landed where the newborn was then transported to Kapiolani Medical Center for Women & Children. Glenn and the nursing team were able to visit Mounga and the infant on Friday.
“It has been very overwhelming, and I’m just so lucky that there were three NICU nurses and a doctor on the plane to help me, and help stabilize him and make sure he was ok for the duration of the flight,” Mounga said.
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