Greg Powell, co-founder of the Shock Trauma Air Rescue Service (STARS) that revolutionized emergency medical air ambulance service in Western Canada, died Wednesday at age 77.
Powell, Alberta’s first formally trained emergency medicine physician, was a second-year UBC medical student working on his elective in 1968 when he volunteered with the Royal Flying Doctors Service in Australia and was given the opportunity to visit a mobile army surgical hospital (MASH) unit in Saigon during the Vietnam War.
Seeing wounded soldiers transported from the field of battle by helicopter brought directly to the operating room planted the seed in Powell that would serve as the inspiration for STARS.
“I knew back home that those with this level of trauma would not have lived,” Powell once said. “They had very serious injuries, yet because they were moved so quickly with so much talent from the battlefield to the hands of the surgeon, they survived.”
Powell was director of emergency medicine at Foothills Hospital in Calgary when he started formulating his idea to use helicopter transport to bring rapid deployment of high-level medical care to critically-injured or morbidly ill patients and shrink response times. He and his emergency physician colleague at Calgary’s General Hospital, Rob Abernathy, decided they had seen enough patients with treatable conditions at the onset of injury arrive at the hospital too late.
“The impetus of STARS was Greg Powell doing a post-mortum review of all the people that were transferred to Calgary for further treatment and he realized that a high percentage of these people had completely treatable, time-sensitive conditions and it was the time delay that was killing them,” said Hans Dysarsz, the original STARS helicopter pilot and a founding director of the organization.
“That came from his experience with the U.S. Medical Corps in Vietnam when they used helicopters extensively to move people from the battlefront to the MASH units.”
In 1985, Powell, Abernathy and Dr. Gill Currie, director of medical operations for the Calgary Fire Department, got together and leased their first helicopter to bring them to accident scenes and tertiary hospitals where they provided treatment at the scene to stabilize patients before transporting them back to Calgary hospitals.
They started out serving southern Alberta and southeastern British Columbia from their base in Calgary, and their success resulted in bases opening in Edmonton (1991) and Grande Prairie (2006), both of which also provided service to BC. STARS then expanded to Saskatoon, Regina and Winnipeg (2011-12).
Dysarsz said one of the first mission STARS flew for a patient retrieval was to Castlegar.
“All British Columbians should mourn (Powell’s) loss because he has done so much for British Columbia — hundreds of British Columbians and tens of thousands of Albertans are alive today or have sustained lesser permanent injuries because of the STARS service that Greg was instrumental in setting up,” said Dysarsz.
“The guy was a Canadian hero. The specialty of emergency medicine didn’t exist (in Calgary) until Greg showed up. He kicked everything into high gear. He was the guy who negotiated with people like (Calgary mayor) Ralph Klein fighting for us to use the City of Calgary’s paramedics. There’s a reason why he got the Order of Canada.”
The early days of STARS were lean times with very little financial support to keep a dedicated helicopter available. The insurance alone cost $50,000 per month. Powell and Dysarsz, who handled the group’s marketing, had the backing of the medical community who saw the value of the service when they met with oil companies and politicians trying to drum up support.
ALC Airlift of Pitt Meadows supplied an MBB/Kawasaki BK 117 purpose-built contracted by the manufacturer to demonstrate its air ambulance capabilities for Expo '86 in Vancouver and Dysarsz was sent to Calgary to try to secure a long-term contract for Airlift.
“Greg said ,’Look, we can’t pay you, but we have a system in Alberta where we can have doctors, nurses, paramedics, and even peace officers come on air evacs and we’ll make sure that you get all the air evacs if that means it will give you enough revenue to keep the aircraft here,’” said Dysarsz.
“It was always a struggle because existing referral pattens of the local doctors or nurses who had their local air ambulance operator and they were afraid of losing if they gave all their business to one supplier out of Calgary.”
The manufacturer gave STARS a special rate to keep the service operating and they went to shopping malls with the helicopter to solicit private donations. But it wasn’t enough. Dysarsz’s boss called him up and said the company was losing too much money and was told he had 10 days to find a solution.
“I literally grabbed the phone book and went through charities and connected with Art Hiromaka and John Panton and the guys from the Southern Alberta Lions organization,” said Dysarsz.
An hour later they had a $100,000 donation. The organization, worried about liability, switched to a non-profit model shortly after the Lions Club got involved and it was known as Southern Alberta Shock Trauma Air Rescue Society until the STARS base opened in Edmonton in 1991.
The fundraising arm that would later become the STARS Foundation, which today generates millions of dollars annually in private and corporate donations, started out with seniors who came by those shopping-mall appearances bringing cheques from their community bake sales.
“It was a real community effort led by Greg,” said Dysarsz, former executive director of Prince George-based Northern BC Helicopter Emergency Rescue Operations Society. “All their egos were parked, they were just in the business of saving lives. These physicians took the lead and said, enough is enough, our job is to save lives, not play politics.”
Born in Welland, Ont., he moved to Edmonton with his family at six months. After earning his degree in family medicine at UBC, Powell completed his emergency medical training at McGill University in Montreal. In the 1970s he was instrumental in launching the emergency medicine residency training program at the University of Alberta and in the early’80s he helped create the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians.
Powell served as CEO of STARS until 2012 and remained with the organization until 2021. In 2015, Foothills Medical Centre names its helipad after Powell.
He was inducted into the Alberta Order of Excellence in 2021.
In 2013 STARS became the first civilian air operator in Canada to adopt night-vision technology and in 2013 it began to stock blood products to provide pre-hospital transfusions to patients.
The non-profit operates a 24-hour emergency communications centre, a work-alone monitoring service and a rural work-site registration service that connects individuals working in rural areas which speeds evacuations in cases of injuries.
Powell also helped establish a critical care transport school and the creation of North America’s first mobile medical human patient simulation training.
Now in its 40th year of operation, STARS has completed more than 60,000 emergency medical missions.
