Career Options
Premier's Award winner Patricia O'Connor founded Medflight Ltd., an air ambulance service serving Northern CanadaHealth-care career takes flightPatricia O'Connor didn't set out to become one of Canada's first female paramedics and the founder of a successful air ambulance service for northern Canadian residents, but in a classic "one-thing-led-to-another" scenario, that's exactly what took place. SHARON ASCHAIEK -- Special to Sun Media |
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O'Connor: MedEvac operation in Nunavut.
"I never thought I would become a paramedic or run a business, it just kind of happened," says O'Connor about her dynamic career trajectory since completing Durham College's two-year nursing program in 1976.
The plan, since O'Connor was just five years old, was to go into traditional hospital nursing, but the country's tough economy scuttled the new graduate's plan.
One day, while mulling her job options, O'Connor saw an ambulance drive by and thought, "I wonder if I could do that."
Sure enough, O'Connor was welcomed by Oshawa Ambulance Service, where she worked for a year before being seconded to Toronto's new air ambulance service.
For three years, O'Connor plied her trade in the skies, caring for critical patients in a fully medically equipped helicopter during their transfer from one hospital to another.
"We were the first group of paramedics in Ontario to do it. At the time, it was very cutting edge," says O'Connor, 55.
O'Connor's foray into the pre-hospital world was no longer a detour but a fixed path, one that would gradually take her further north.
In 1984, O'Connor was invited to work at a "fixed-wing" air ambulance service in Fort McMurray, Alta., at the time the only one of its kind in the country. A year later, she was recruited by the director of the St. John Ambulance service in Yellowknife to help start and oversee the first flight nurse service in the Northwest Territories.
Drawing on her pre-hospital training and experience and summoning
leadership skills for the first time, she successfully ran the operation for five years.
By then, the intense, almost around-the-clock schedule was taking its toll, and O'Connor decided to take a year off. But it wasn't long before her track record and talent in the field attracted the attention of an aviation company in Edmonton seeking to start a Med-Evac operation serving Cambridge Bay, which is now a part of Nunavut.
With the company planning to provide the planes and pilots, O'Connor saw a perfect opportunity to start her own business.
"It started very simply by me buying my own equipment on my credit card, building it slowly and working at it," she recalls.
Her entrepreneurial project, which she called Medflight and which she ran almost single-handedly -- she hired and trained aeromedical personnel, oversaw payroll and accounting and maintained the interior of the planes -- ended up turning into a robust business entity that, at its peak, responded to more than 100 calls a month in Cambridge Bay and also Yellowknife.
Today operating solely in Cambridge Bay, the service picks up patients from the area's most remote places, including tiny two-staff health centres, hunting and fishing camps, mining operations and industrial sites.
"I like that I get to do things the way I want to do them. It's my vision, and I believe in my vision. I'm proud of what I'm doing," she says.
She's not the only one: last week, she was honoured with a 2008 Ontario Premier's Award for her contributions to health sciences.
"I was really amazed. It's a thrill for my home province to think something I've done so far away is worth mentioning," she says. "I brought every principle I learned at college and applied it here; without that background, I wouldn't be doing what I do today."
sharon@summitmediagroup.com
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