SkyMed takes the medical drama to northern Canada
New series brings attention to health care in remote Canadian communities
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story included quotes from showrunner Julie Puckrin's interview with the CBC radio show Fresh Air. Puckrin had made those comments in a different context and not for the purpose of this story. Her quotes have been removed and the story has been updated.
On the surface, SkyMed focuses on themes familiar to TV audiences: a group of good-looking doctors, nurses and paramedics; high-stakes medical emergencies; and a healthy dose of sexual tension.
The difference between Grey's Anatomy, House, ER and this show? All the time its characters spend above 20,000 feet — and the places they touch down.
The series, which premiered on CBC TV and CBC Gem on July 10, looks at first responders living and working in Manitoba's north — an area with limited road access that often requires paramedics to fly patients into and out of remote communities, both on the show and in reality.
Medical dramas are well represented on television. A few, such as Transplant and Nurses, to name two of the most recent, are even set in Canada.
Northern exposure
The series isn't the only production to showcase the realities of living in Northern Canada. Nyla Innuksuk's 2022 horror film Slash/Back was filmed entirely on Baffin Island in the Nunavut hamlet of Pangnirtung, roughly 300 km from Iqaluit. Pangnirtung has no roads leading in or out, which required the entire cast and crew to live in a high school gymnasium for the entire filming process to avoid exacerbating the territory's ongoing housing crisis.
Slash/Back was the first feature-length film ever shot in the village, and Innuksuk said that, alongside bringing attention to Nunavut as a filming location, she wanted to bring light to the issues those in the community face.
Cassandra Wajuntah, an assistant professor at the First Nations University of Canada in Regina, and director of the Indigenous Peoples Health Research Centre, said shows like SkyMed can raise awareness around health and health care in northern communities in similar ways.
That awareness mostly comes from highlighting social determinants of health — endemic issues that cause increased medical rate of events — like access to clean drinking water, safe housing and affordable food.
Wajuntah, who was born in Thompson, Manitoba, and grew up in northern Saskatchewan, said those are the biggest issues many northern residents want dealt with.
"Northern communities have a unique set of challenges," she said. "Canadians complain about our health care system — wait times accessing, going to the E.R., that kind of thing — but for northern Indigenous communities in particular, those challenges are exacerbated times ten."
Burnout common
Sarah Goulet, a family doctor in Manitoba's Garden Hill First Nation, noted another problem in such communities. Garden Hill, like many of the locations featured in the show, is remote — 500 kilometres north of Winnipeg, and inaccessible by road.
With staff shortages common and the community chronically under-resourced, it can be difficult for medical workers to keep going.
"What I hear from our physicians all the time is that just feeling like you're helpless in the system is probably the number one thing that leads to burnout," she said.
In Garden Hill, Goulet said, that helpless feeling manifests in multiple ways — not having a pharmacy, for example, means that even urgent medication orders can take days to arrive, as they have to be faxed, confirmed and shipped from Winnipeg while patients wait.
Goulet and Wajuntah each said that another, more systemic issue is dealing with stereotyping from the medical community at large, which can frustrate attempts to get effective care for patients at multiple levels. In the face of those issues, more cultural competency training is needed for health-care workers
Both argued that more training is also needed for the people from those communities, so they can be involved in health care themselves.
"I see that every day, how impactful it is to have members of the communities here, whether they're community health representatives, whether they work in home care, whether they're working as nurses and mental health workers," said Goulet, who is herself Métis. "The impact that they have compared to those of us who travel here is tremendous."
SkyMed deals with some of those issues, something that Goulet praised it for. But there are still very few shows like it, which Wajuntah said needs to change in order to improve public perception.
"It's one thing to do news articles and documentaries, but there are so many ways — including the artistic expression of scripted television — to get across these messages and these experiences of Indigenous people in these communities," Wajuntah said. "I think the show can really open a door to those discussions for the community."
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With files from Lisa Xing and Laura Thompson