By Sabine Martin
The Wisconsin State Journal
MADISON, Wis. — Mike Abernethy had an unexpected meeting with a former patient in 2020 — one he’ll never forget.
It was after a shift in the emergency department. He was checking out with groceries at Walmart when a man approached him and asked, “Are you Dr. Abernethy?”
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Abernethy had no recollection of the man until he unzipped his jacket and revealed a large scar.
“All of a sudden, it’s him. Boom,” Abernethy said.
Two decades earlier, Abernethy had treated the man as a critically injured child — one of thousands of patients he’s cared for during his more than three decades as a physician.
Abernethy, 66, has had the longest continuous service of any emergency medicine faculty at UW-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health , according to the university. He has been with UW Health Med Flight since 1992.
But earlier this month, he retired from UW Health’s Med Flight emergency helicopter medical transport service after spending 34-plus years in the field, transporting more than 4,000 patients.
Most recently, he has worked out of UW Health’s Janesville Med Flight base, which opened in June 2024. UW Health has regional Med Flight bases in Janesville, Mineral Point and Portage to serve the state.
“I haven’t found anyone yet, as far as physicians, who have been doing it longer than I have,” he said, sitting in the kitchen of UW Health’s Janesville base.
From funeral homes to Med Flight
Abernethy’s interest in medicine began when he was 15. He volunteered as an ambulance attendant at his local funeral home while growing up in Steubenville, Ohio, a town near Pittsburgh.
“That’s back before the idea of EMS. People don’t realize that in the 1950s and 1960s, probably half of the ambulance services in the United States were run by funeral homes,” he said.
Before finding his current specialty, he worked as a steelworker, an emergency medical technician and a military flight medic. He attended Youngstown State University and later Ohio State University for engineering before attending medical school at the University of Cincinnati.
Abernethy got his introduction to emergency air medical transport during his residency at the University of Chicago.
“I can honestly say, since I left residency, it’s been Disney World,” he said. “… to train in that environment and to see that sort of acuity, it sort of set me for life.”
But the decades of continuous 24-hour shifts caught up to him in 2023 when, while running outside, he passed out due to cardiac arrest. He woke up on the ground, confused and looked at his smart watch. His heart had stopped for 45 seconds.
“One thing led to another, and I ended up getting a quintuple bypass at UW Health,” he said.
“There’s been proven medical literature to show that, yeah, working nights is not a good thing.”
After his MedFlight retirement, he plans to continue as a physician in Beloit Memorial Hospital’s emergency department — but this time only working day shifts.
“These are vacations, because you’re not working the night shift anymore,” he said.
Abernethy said his wife and two adult children, as well as grandkids, are excited for the extra time with him.
“Basically, for the last 30 years, I’ve been gone 100 nights a year, which is a lot,” he said.
Going international
During his career, Abernethy has risen to become a leading voice in the field, calling for regulations in the country around emergency air medical transport.
He served on a federal U.S. Department of Transportation advisory committee to make air medical services more transparent to patients and is the first American faculty member in the United Kingdom -based Anesthesia Trauma and Critical Care group, which trains health care professionals in advanced trauma care.
The U.S. is behind other countries in regulating air medical transport and pre-hospital emergency care, and many hospitals don’t have adequate facilities, he said.
In countries like England, there is a national health service in which patients’ pre-hospital care is well funded, he said.
Andrew Cathers, who serves as medical director for UW Health Med Flight and teaches alongside Abernethy, called him a “pioneer from the United States in terms of speaking, educating and collaborating with the much bigger international community.”
It was Abernethy who encouraged Cathers at a conference more than a decade ago to pursue a fellowship in retrieval and critical care transport medicine with Med Flight at UW Health.
“It’s very hard to replicate those thousands of hours of experience taking care of patients in all of these different situations,” Cathers said. “I don’t really know if we’ll ever have another person with that level of experience at our program.”
UW Health’s Med Flight program has a board-certified physician on every flight, which is a rare practice in the country, Abernethy said.
“UW has made quite a commitment, because, as I said, in the industry, things are really highly unregulated compared to other countries,” he said. “You can fly small helicopters, but even the level of training needed to become a flight paramedic or flight nurse — it varies greatly from program to program.”
“We’re sort of an enigma here (at UW Health ). It’s one of the few places in the country where you can get in an accident on I-90 and have a professor of emergency medicine land at the crash site or even just a physician,” he said.
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