Pulling Up Their Sleeves and Getting on with It: Providing Health Care in a Northern Remote Region

Based on the written correspondence between nurses situated at northern outpost nursing stations and their supervisors in Regina, this paper illustrates the complexities of providing nursing care in Northern Saskatchewan between the mid-1940s and late 1950s. The paper begins with a discussion of the steps taken by governments to deal with what I refer to as a "landscape of hardship" in Northern Saskatchewan that precipitated creation of the nursing stations. However, government failure to provide adequate support for the nurses and nursing stations resulted in considerable hardship and frustration for the nurses to which, as their correspondence shows, they often objected.