Canadian Bush Pilots and Air Medical Services

Paper Summary:

This paper examines the rise of air medical and evacuation services in northern and remote areas of Canada after the 1920s, noting the continuing need for air ambulance services for Canadians living beyond road or rail networks. The paper points out that a great array of popular history material has been published in the last thirty years or so attesting to the romantic lives of bush pilots who indeed were often self-styled persons to occupy their own boundless milieu. The paper adds that a study of the many female bush pilots provides an intriguing aside on the women's history emphasis of the last decades that can lend an impression of women's domesticity that was by no means general. The paper concludes that, today, bush pilots retain their particular glamour, being well-equipped and trained with every benefit of modern communications and navigation, and still risking unusual, even ridiculous situations.

Outline:
Introduction
A Twentieth-Century Progression
Medical Services in Northern Canada
Saskatchewan
Training of Pilots and Medical Staff
Concluding Discussion

From the Paper:

"With socialized medicine as a federal Canadian addition, outpost infirmaries and hospitals were incorporated into local communities but some memoirs refer to occasional doctors who carried on in remote service, radioing instructions to particular flying companies or pilots; instructions arrived via Royal Canadian Air Force stations, too, in a continuing range of services that has by no means subsided with the advent of tele-medicine. Nursing were sometimes found in contract posts who might be better described today as physician's assistants in their obstetrical and orthopedic skills, not a few of them turning to surgery where there was no doctor and air evacuation impossible in time to save lives. (Larmour 1988) The international profession of nursing took considerable interest in the post-World War II decades in what Canadian provinces and territories were beginning to pioneer in nursing stations, infirmaries, public information on when to bring patients to radio dispatch centres and all else done and learned by practitioners in the course of northern or Arctic service. (Waller 1964, King 1968, Smith 1972)"

Sample of Sources Used:

• Campbell, Donald N. Wings of Mercy - a Story of the Saskatchewan Air Ambulance. North Battleford: Turner Warwick, 1988.
• Chabun, W. "Novel Service was First of its Kind in the World." The Leader-Post. December 24, 1993.
• Foster, J.A. The Bush Pilots - a Pictorial History of a Canadian Phenomenon. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990.
• Gagne, J., A. Lavoie and P. Frechette. "The Quebec Air Medical Evacuation Program - an Evolution Influenced by Medical Progress and the Airline Industry." Air Medicine Journal. 25. (2006), 261-264.
• Hotson, F.W. De Havilland in Canada. Toronto: CANAV, 1998.

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