“Depending on the town there’s different demographics ... in [X] there’s a big reserve right beside it so a lot of the patients were First Nations and so that was a lot different than ... [Y] that didn’t have any reserves around it.”

“It’s minus 30 outside and a snowstorm for 3 weeks ... that was part of the reason that they didn’t go was because it wasn’t super easy to just to pop to the next town and get it done.”

“They have events, they have lots of activities, but those are only available in [X] and we don’t have any chance ... a 5-hour drive one way and [a] 5-hour drive the other way, just to attend an event.”

“The medicine in [Z] isn’t necessarily rural. It’s certainly remote but it’s not necessarily rural. I mean we have the MRI scanner. We have specialists and stuff like that.”

“I knew ... there wouldn’t be as many systems in place for us as learners because [a] regular hospital does not depend on learners to function at all. So, I knew that it wasn’t as service based going into it. And I was very much okay with that.”

“You’re not often working with another resident who can, kind of, give you a sense of like, where should I be. Like, kind of, benchmark based on where other people are at.”

“There were services available, but everyone there was just, sort of ... the attitude that was taken on, that there was no point, and so just nobody did it.”

“It may be a family medicine thing that because the residency’s short, it won’t be very long before residents are colleagues so you may as well treat them like colleagues straight away. Yeah, but I think that’s an aspect that definitely takes the edge off things, you know, I think everyone’s very approachable.”

“I wasn’t expecting so much diversity in the population ... you think, like, northern, small town, and it’s probably 90% Anglo-Saxon population without too much diversity there, but ... there’s a good amount of immigrants, Aboriginal populations.”