STARS provides service to agriculture sector

By Miriam Ostermann, Associate Editor

For more than 20 years, the Shock Trauma Air Rescue Society (STARS) Emergency Link Centre has provided site monitoring and emergency response co-ordination services to organizations and employees working in remote or dangerous locations – especially in the oil and gas sector.
Last June, the charitable organization extended the service, for the first time, to individuals working or travelling alone, with the creation of the SOLUS emergency response app.
The project came to fruition after individuals in the agriculture sector approached STARS at trade shows and municipal meetings inquiring about an emergency response service for farmers and employees working alone and in remote areas. STARS had previously provided monitoring on an enterprise level – where a company outfits everybody with the service – but now individuals can subscribe as necessary.
“First and foremost, this is not meant to replace 911 but to complement it and to work with 911,” said Mark Oddan, senior communications advisor with STARS. “We had focused initially on bringing it to the agricultural audience because they were the ones we had heard from the most that there was a need there.”
The SOLUS app is an inexpensive service, $9.99 per month, which is powered by STARS and its Emergency Link Centre. The app allows for custom-tailored emergency response in relation to the severity of the incident. It can alert emergency contacts, nearby workers and neighbours through the neighbour-helping-neighbour safety network, provides advice from an on-call transport physician, allows the individual to load information on pre-existing medical conditions, if necessary dispatches the STARS helicopter air medical team and provides live GPS coordinates. The smartphone app makes it possible to request and receive 24/7 emergency assistance anywhere in Canada where cell signal can be received.
“The value of the app is twofold: the first is the neighbour-helping-neighbour network, where the mapping system that we have will show where the absolute nearest point of help is while paramedics arrive; and the second is preloaded by the user with any of their pertinent medical information,” Oddan said. “If a famer sends a signal that he’s having an emergency and we know that five miles down the road is a site that we monitor which may have a defibrillator or a medic on site, we can leverage them to help this person who’s in distress. Also, we know when they come online exactly where they are, so that whole time between us and 911 that could be spent figuring out where they’re located is essentially a non-issue.”
STARS flies many missions to rural British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and tended to 10 incidents in Wheatland County and 18 in Strathmore for the 2016-17 fiscal year. The organization said the number of farming-related incidents remains steady on an annual basis.
“We work very closely with our partners and our allies in the chain of survival, such as EMS and fire departments, and the good thing about using STARS is when someone is truly critically ill or injured, STARS is able to land right on the scene, be it a rural property or the side of the road,” said STARS spokesperson Fatima Khawaja.
“We actually land on the rural property, where ground ambulance may have been quite a ways away. Just based on the fact that we can bypass roads and highways and get the patients tertiary care, could result in a more positive outcome depending on the type of injury.”
The SOLUS app has been available since June 2017. STARS is currently working on enhancing the app with a newer version.