White Coat, Black Art

Attracting a family doctor to work in a community is challenging, with fewer physicians choosing family medicine. That's why Cheryl Gnyp, the recruiter for Castlegar, B.C., needs to stand out. She uses the board game Operation and specialized coffee as part of her 10-minute sales pitch to potential recruits at conferences. It can take years before a doctor starts working in the community, but she’...

Judith Morrison needs a kidney. While she's on dialysis, her sister Catherine is putting out a public plea for a living donor. But the search has been hard. And if they do find a donor, the sisters say that person will have to go through a long and opaque testing process. A process that experts say needs to be improved across Canada because the demand for kidney donations is high.

One morning as she arrived for her hospital shift, Winnipeg nurse Jennifer Noone was assaulted outside the staff entrance, leaving her with a bad concussion and PTSD. Rather than stay silent, she took the unusual step of having her assailant charged with assault. Manitoba Nurses Union President Darlene Jackson says there needs to be more and better security and violence should not be accepted as j...

At 28 years old, Dr. Soania Mathur was building her medical practice and expecting her first child. Then, she was diagnosed with Young-Onset Parkinson’s Disease. She tried to ignore her diagnosis for a decade, but as the symptoms progressed, she had to close her practice. Now, the self-described "Unshakeable MD" uses her experience as both a patient and a doctor to advocate for especially young pe...

How far would you go to test your body in extreme heat? Ironworker apprentice Britnee Miazek travels hundreds of kilometres to Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario for a gruelling experiment to see how her body deals with high temperatures. She wants to find out why she stopped getting her period while working in sweltering conditions on a coke oven. Researchers are hoping to find answers f...

Indigenous Canadians are avoiding going to the doctor or seeking care in hospitals, says the president of The Indigenous Physicians Association. The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact, but there's also another potentially deadly factor: racism. "People are fearing that they will be treated in a racist manner, or not receive the standard of care that a non-Indigenous person would," Dr. Cornelia (N...

When you get sick and call an ambulance or you make your way to the local ER, the assumption is you're heading to a safe place. They'll greet you, treat you and heal you. But it's not something all Canadians can take for granted -- we were yet again reminded of that yet again in September, when Joyce Equachan, a 37-year old mother of five and member of the Atikamekw Nation, recorded and made publi...