Alumni Paul Stefan (left) and Peter Rempel (right) share experiences responding to COVID-19 in their Simcoe pharmacy
Before COVID-19 struck, a normal day at the Roulston’s Wellness Centre Pharmacy in Simcoe featured patient consultations in private counselling rooms, walk-in customers, in-person visits to long-term care (LTC) homes and medication preparation for many local facilities and homes.
“In our compliance packaging and LTC home department, we used to have 11 or 12 people in close proximity, working side by side on preparing orders for customers,” says Paul Stefan (Rx2014), one of two pharmacy alumni working at the centre. “Since COVID, we’ve had to completely reallocate our space. We moved OTC shelving to allow us to set up individual work stations to maintain physical distancing — the whole layout of our store has changed.”
Located in downtown Simcoe, the Wellness Centre isn’t just a large pharmacy. The store has a home health-care department that supplies walkers and other items important to elderly patients, and houses the offices of 10 physicians. It also services five long-term care homes, six retirement homes and three individual group home organizations. This means that in addition to serving walk-in customers, they also prepare medications for the residents of those facilities, ensuring medication is safely packaged, and providing counselling services and electronic Medication Administration Record management for residents.
Though some procedures changed in response to COVID, the pharmacy has stayed operational while continuing to provide these necessary services.
We closed our doors to walk-in customers in mid-March and have recently reopened. We transitioned our many services to be offered over the phone. But now that we’ve reopened, we’re ensuring to use appropriate PPE, like face shields and gowns when we’re in direct contact with a patient, to ensure the safety of our staff and our community.
The Wellness Centre serves a diverse population, including many smaller communities, local families and people of all ages. They do have many patients over the age of 65, and these patients are often taking five or more chronic medications and require assistance managing those meds. Continuing to provide medications to all these groups, even when walk-in customers were not allowed, resulted in some added expenses.
“When the store was closed to the public, we delivered all medications. We had to hire extra drivers to keep up with demand. We also service a wide area and even simple things like encouraging some of our patients out in the country to use digital payment systems, were small challenges,” says Peter.
Ensuring delivery in a timely manner is important, especially given the large geographic area that the Wellness Centre serves. They’ve implemented safety policies like contact-less delivery where the driver leaves medications in a mailbox or at the front door and watches to ensure that the patient comes out to retrieve them.
To continue to service the long-term care homes, the team has further divided their efforts.
“We’ve separated our compliance packaging and LTC departments completely to minimize unnecessary contact between staff,” says Paul. “The LTC medication preparation takes place in the basement where they have more space to work with. They ensure all medications are safely packaged and prepared for distribution to the facilities we serve. We continue to collaborate across teams, over the phone with LTC and retirement home staff, and also with the physicians who work in our building.”
The experience has taught Peter and Paul about resiliency, not just of their own team but of their community as a whole.
“In those early days when PPE was hard to source, we had donations from the community, friends of friends making us masks and local restaurants donating gloves,” says Peter.
I’ve been impressed at how quickly and readily everyone adapted. Our staff and our patients took in the messaging — they knew this was important — and we’ve all been flexible, accepting that things are different now. We all have a part to play in this, and it’s been inspiring to see how resilient we are in the face of challenges.