Paul Armstrong will be named an Officer of the Order of Canada at a ceremony in Ottawa later this year.
If young Paul Armstrong had been told that he would one day receive Canada's most prestigious honour, he probably wouldn't have believed it.
"This was not on my radar," he laughed. "As a small-town boy from northern Ontario who grew up in an area that doesn't have a university, it's very special. There were no icons where I was. This was beyond my imagination."
Guided by his high school and undergraduate teachers to pursue a career in medicine, the Queen's University alumnus credits his mentors and colleagues for his lifetime of success, noting that clinical and academic health fields are fuelled by a spirit of collaboration. Today, the professor of medicine and director of the Canadian Vigour Centre at the U of A is revered by budding scientists and clinicians as a mentor in his own right.
"The privilege of working in a university environment gives you endless opportunities to do things that you couldn't do otherwise. It's a great thing to wake up in the morning and only be limited by your ideas, your curiosity and talents, and willingness to work hard to make a contribution. I'm so grateful and feel very privileged to be able to give back and be recognized at the same time."
As founding president of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, Canada's foremost fellowship of experts who inform national health policies, Armstrong is internationally recognized for his transformative research in acute cardiac care and Canadian health-care leadership. Officer of the Order of Canada is the latest addition to his list of accolades, which includes the prestigious Prix Galien Canada Research Award, U of A's University Cup and Distinguished University Professor.
"He's played a major role in developing the Canadian VIGOUR center (Virtual Coordinating Centre for Global Collaborative Cardiovascular Research), which is recognized for doing excellent clinical trials in cardiology," said Lorne Tyrrell, a fellow Officer of the Order of Canada and former dean of the the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry. "He led a major study on the use of clot-busting drugs in ambulances for early intervention in acute cardiac diseases. This was an important step in the evolution of treating heart patients, and is now being explored for stroke patients."
Envisioning a new medical model
Armstrong has seen remarkable changes throughout his career, but continues to set his sights on improvement.
"Since I started out the hospital mortality for heart attack has fallen from 30 per cent to about five to seven per cent which is an extraordinary thing," Armstrong said. "But I worry that we've built a health-care system where death is sometimes looked at as a medical failure rather than a natural evolution."
He hopes to see a shift in Canada's approach to health care, starting with better use of resources, increased public engagement and increasing the focus on quality of life.
"We need to do better in using the substantial resources that we're allocating to health. And I think we can do that. There are ways and means of making wiser and more cost-efficient choices," Armstrong said.
"I'm cautiously optimistic that we're headed in the right direction but we need to get people's attention, and we need to listen, and we need to engage young people. So I'm tickled pink that in March I'll be spending a couple of hours in high-school classrooms talking to young people about choices and some of the opportunities in medicine, but also hopefully awakening them to some of these issues."
Included in the 2018 cohort of Order of Canada honorees are Tom Feasby, member of the Order of Canada, former U of A Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry's Associate Dean of Clinical Affairs (now neurologist at the University of Calgary); Eric Schloss, member of the Order of Canada, '59 BA, '63 MD, clinical professor of dermatology and well-known philanthropist; and Joseph B. Martin, officer of the Order of Canada, '62 MD, former Dean of Harvard, U of A Distinguished Alumni Award recipient in 2007 and U of A Honorary Degree recipient in 1988.
"This was a very good year for the Order of Canada," said Tyrrell. "These are good people that are recognized with Canada's highest recognition and they all deserve it. Congratulations to all of them."