Ex-flight paramedic creates app to provide emergency first-aid help

According to Midland resident Scott Ashley: “You can’t save everybody, but you sure can save a lot of people.”

He would know. 

Having served an extensive career as an emergency responder across Canada and in the United States, he was working as a critical-care flight paramedic on the Ornge air ambulance helicopter from Sunnybrook Hospital when he found a way to make an even larger difference in saving lives.

“We would arrive at situations and nobody knew what to do. Even big corporations,” the 62-year-old said. “Somewhere there was a workplace accident or injury, or someone had a heart attack or whatever, nobody was really sure what to do.”

Forming a company called Get Ready in 2010 with other like-minded individuals, their initial project was to merge Trillium Health Partners from several hospitals. In doing so, president and CEO Ashley discovered that their emergency procedures were almost entirely policy-based with very little in the way of job action sheets for employees to follow, whether they were working a switchboard, in maintenance or as an executive director.

“What exactly are you going to do when there’s a fire? Who’s meeting the fire truck? Who’s getting people out of the building? Who’s talking to the media?” Ashley had asked.

Upon completion, which resulted in a thick binder, he told his fellows: “This is the last time we're doing this; so we created Get Ready Online… with the notion that we wanted to get the procedures on people's phones and away from the paper.”

Ashley, calling himself ‘the idea guy’, pulled together a team of emergency professionals from across various fields. “We brought in police, fire, RCMP; we had some JTF 2 (Joint Task Force 2), critical care – people who had been there and done that.”

Now 14 years later, Ready First Aide is being launched to regional organizations as a web-based smartphone app, to be sold at a corporate level but personalized and tailored to that businesses’ employees, customers and needs.

Ashley described various scenarios where the actions of a “willing bystander” could be the difference between saving a person’s life or idly waiting crucial minutes for 911 to arrive, whether that be through utilizing information from a video on CPR or administering naloxone for an opioid overdose.

“Here, it'll have your logo but it'll be a QR code,” said Ashley, holding up a mock business display. “The town of Midland, the town of Penetang, Barrie, whatever the school board or hockey association, team sports, businesses – can have a unique code so that their staff can click on this; or the community could put it in public buildings and restaurants.

“That way if there’s changes, updates, new procedures – they’re always getting the most current version,” Ashley added. “It's aligned where we follow the guidelines of all the major organizations: Health Canada; Heart and Stroke Foundation; WSIB; American Heart Association; OSHA – so we're not telling you to do something that's not accurate.”

A beta test had been initiated with the Gilbert Centre for Social and Support Services in Barrie, according to Ashley, with an intent to meet with area hospitals in the near future.

“It's not just a personal goal, but a team goal of ours as emergency professionals to make a difference,” Ashley stated. “No one organization is going to solve the problems; but collectively, the more we do as a community the bigger impact we can make.”