Dr. Greg Powell spent his career making sure Albertans hurt far from a hospital had a fighting chance of reaching one in time. In 2021, the Government of Alberta named him to the Alberta Order of Excellence for co-founding the Shock Trauma Air Rescue Service, known across the province simply as STARS. His Alberta Order of Excellence profile traces the idea back to a hospital tent near Saigon and a childhood spent asking for a doctor’s bag every Christmas.
A Seed Planted Near Saigon
Dwight Gregory Powell was born in Welland, Ontario, in 1947 and moved to Alberta as an infant when his father took an engineering job in the oil industry. He grew up in Edmonton but spent summers on relatives’ farmland near Blackfalds, and by his own account never seriously considered any career but medicine. As a second-year medical student at the University of British Columbia, he used his elective time to join a Flying Doctor Service in Australia, and on the way there visited a mobile army surgical hospital in Vietnam. Watching badly wounded soldiers survive because they reached surgeons quickly, he understood that speed, not just skill, could be the difference between life and death.
Building Canada’s Emergency Medicine Specialty
After finishing his degree and training in Calgary and at McGill University, Greg returned to Foothills Hospital as the city’s only formally trained emergency physician and helped launch the University of Calgary’s Emergency Medicine Residency program. He was part of the small group that helped establish the Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians and worked with national colleges to build formal emergency medicine training across the country, criss-crossing Canada to persuade universities to adopt the specialty.
From a Single Helicopter to a Continental Network
The memory of Vietnam never left him, and in the early 1980s Greg co-founded STARS, using helicopters staffed with trained medical crews to bring tertiary-level care to patients who could not otherwise reach it in time. Funding was thin in the early years, but a community fundraiser in Hanna showed Greg how deeply rural Albertans valued the service, and the STARS Foundation grew from there. Bases followed in Edmonton in 1991 and Grande Prairie in 2006, with Saskatchewan and Manitoba operations opening between 2011 and 2012. Along the way, Greg helped pioneer night vision goggle technology for helicopter crews and built the STARS Emergency Link Centre, a 24-hour communications hub connecting rural providers with urban specialists.
A Career That Kept Giving
A licensed pilot since age 26, Greg’s honours include the Alberta Centennial Medal in 2005, recognition as one of Alberta’s Physicians of the Century in 2006, the Order of Canada that same year, the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2012, and induction into the Canadian Aviation Hall of Fame in 2018, with the Foothills Medical Centre helipad named for him in 2015. He retired as STARS President and CEO in 2012, but continues advocacy work with his wife Linda around organ and tissue donation, a cause shaped by his own diagnosis of liver disease linked to a tainted blood transfusion decades earlier.
Greg’s expertise was called on well beyond STARS. He chaired Emergency Medical Services for the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics, served as Medical Director for Internationally Protected Persons at the 2002 G8 Summit in Kananaskis, and served as a past president of the Association of Air Medical Services. He also poured energy into training the next generation, establishing a critical care transport academy for doctors, nurses and paramedics and overseeing the creation of the first mobile medical human patient simulation training program in North America. Today he continues to serve on boards including the Health Quality Council of Alberta and the Foothills Country Hospice, and he and Linda live in the Foothills area with their three adult children and a grandson, enjoying the same rural pace of life that first drew Greg to Blackfalds as a boy.
How many lives does a single good idea, chased for decades without giving up, end up saving?
