Check into The Good Karma Hospital today

Update: Good Karma Hospital is no longer on Showmax. Find your next binge in the full series catalogue here.

Love medical dramas? There’s a new one on Showmax that you just can’t miss: The Good Karma Hospital, about young doctor Ruby Walker swapping first-world luxury for the bare minimum of medical supplies when she moves from the UK to a clinic in India. Watch now »

“Ruby is at rockbottom. She’s overworked and burnt out. It’s crumbled around her and she knows that she needs to uproot her life and find herself,” sighs Amrita Acharia in an interview with DesiBlitz.com. Amrita plays young doctor Ruby Walker in British period drama The Good Karma Hospital (2017-current; Season 1 is available to internet streaming service Showmax).

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Moving from the NHS (National Health Service) in the UK to an understaffed, underfunded and desperately impoverished clinic in India is the best thing she’s done, hints the British actress. “She is all in. There is no half-way with her. She has a newly found love for her job that she lost back in the UK.” But it’s not all sunshine and daisies – Ruby is in a whole new world with a whole new set of problems, like…

Show me the money

The Good Karma Hospital – that’s its real name – isn’t so much a medical centre as it is a cottage with boxes of bandages and a few gurneys, laughs Amrita. “The show is very bold. It doesn’t shy away from the s**t in life and from the socio-economic situation in India and why Ruby’s decisions aren’t the same as she’d make in the UK [in terms of treating patients, wasting time and money on tests or handling emergency situations].” Forget about X-ray machines. Instead, Ruby and her colleagues have a prod here, a poke there and a squeeze or two if needed. Equipment is at a premium and if you snooze, you lose. Even the wheelchair has a waiting list as long as your arm for patients who need to be carted around the make-shift medical site.

One of the locals

Being an outsider is probably more difficult for Ruby than the lack of, well, everything she was used to at her job in the UK. And it’s something the actress admits to Standard.co.uk that she could understand. “It was interesting [filming] in Sri Lanka because I almost felt that I had reconnected with that [Nepalese] part of myself, having been brought up in the Western World since the age of seven.” Amrita adds that her character “is thrown in the deep end of a culture that throws the belief system she has grown up with into a new light”. Patients are short and abrupt with “this young woman doctor” who thinks that she knows it all and her co-workers are worse. Ruby’s new world is fast-paced, it’s hustle-and-bustle, busy busy busy. “There’s no time to rest on your laurels,” laughs Amrita. “Life at the Good Karma Hospital is a never-ending drama – but that’s what makes it so much fun!”

Gang warfare

But making her new life even more difficult are Ruby’s co-workers at the Good Karma Hospital. Sure, they’ve got good intentions, but they’re also set in their ways and this newcomer is disrupting the life they’ve built. And it’s something that adds to the story, says Amrita: “My favourite thing about this show is that at its heart it’s an ensemble. It is those core characters that we’re most invested in. They are all fantastic, layered characters and have scope for so much storytelling.”

From Ruby’s rough-around-the-edges new boss Dr Lydia Fonseca (Amanda Redman), who welcomes her with open arms, to her stricter and decidedly more like a stone wall colleague Dr Gabriel (James Floyd), Ruby is going to meet people who’ll push her, hurt her, protect her and help her develop as a person and a professional. “That doesn’t mean she’s going to always get on with everyone she meets,” says Amrita, “but she embraces the culture as she opens her eyes and gets a greater understanding. She’s opinionated but never really judgemental. She wants to find her own feet and this is the perfect place and time.”