Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs) Safety Fatality File

Mike Hart, the 43-year-old Alberta Health Services paramedic who died while on duty in Airdrie on Saturday, is being remembered as a passionate first responder who always pushed and advocated for the system to be better.

“If you or your family had a medical emergency, Mike would be the one that you would want to come and treat you,” said Hart’s close friend and former colleague Daniel Onerheim.

“He went over and above and beyond in everything he did. If you ever interacted with Mike you would walk away with a smile on your face. … He just brought joy to everyone that he touched.”

Hart, who was based out of Calgary and had worked in the field for nearly 20 years, died at the Airdrie Urgent Care Centre on Saturday morning. Friends and co-workers corroborated information that he died after going into cardiac arrest near the end of his overnight shift. Nurses and a doctor at the facility tended to Hart, attempting to resuscitate him before his death. He leaves behind two brothers and his father.

“Mike was a giant,” said another of Hart’s former colleagues, Ian Burgess, who worked with him when the two were both on the council of the Alberta College of Paramedics in the late 2000s.

“He got involved in the profession at a very intimate level — always pushing the profession forward, always advocating.”

Jason Fong went to junior high school with Hart before the two found themselves along the same career path later in life. The two more or less “came up together in the industry,” said Fong.

“He’s the type of guy that was always willing to give you the shirt off his back and give you a place in his home if you needed it,” said Fong, who works as a paramedic with AHS. “He always put his patients upfront before anything else and he always lived by the honourable code, as it were.”

Hart worked all over the province during his 20-year career in several different roles; from education to enforcement to working as a firefighter in integrated first response services. At the time of his death, he was working as an advanced care paramedic with AHS. Hart’s co-workers and friends stressed that the political issues surrounding his death shouldn’t overshadow who he was as a person or as a paramedic.