UW alumnus and pharmacist shares COVID-19 insights

Abhay Patel employs Waterloo Pharmacy alumni and students at his five stores in Waterloo Region

Abhay Patel’s road to community pharmacy practice was decidedly unconventional.

After earning a chemical engineering degree from the University of Waterloo in 2005, the Kitchener-Waterloo native pursued an interest in renewable energy with further study in Germany. When his passion for that field waned, Patel turned to health care and the opportunities it presented in terms of business ownership.

In particular, he was interested in pharmacy and the position as owner-operator. Though he’d missed the deadline for Canadian programs, he applied in time to a pharmacy school in England and started pharmacy school there in 2007.

Patel was back in Canada by 2012 to begin building a business that now includes ownership of five stores throughout Waterloo Region. He most often works at his first location in New Hamburg.

A few of the stores offer full services in home health-care, one took over a former health food store and another is located at a walk-in clinic. Many of his employees are Waterloo Pharmacy alumni and he also regularly hires co-op students.

The business gave Patel a ringside seat on the myriad ways COVID-19 has impacted community pharmacies.

“A number of my stores are located in smaller towns. In these areas, pharmacies are often the place people go to find answers,” he says. “It’s been hard because the answers change so often and the scope and duration of this is so different from what we initially expected.”

His pharmacies have grappled, for instance, with many of the downstream effects of business closures.

“Pharmacies were labelled essential - rightly so - while other health offices were not,” Patel says. “As a result, we’ve seen a surge in patients who are unable to get in to see their specialist, family physician or even dentist.”

As a result, Patel’s pharmacists often performed prescription renewals or adaptations of existing prescriptions to ensure patients could continue accessing effective medications. The experience has reinforced his belief that pharmacists should have expanded roles.

“Certainly, we are seeing a very strong case being made for minor ailments prescribing,” he says. “We’ve seen pharmacists step up and make use of their existing scope. Patients have been appreciative because we are so accessible and responsive in these challenging times.”

“There was a definite turning point when things became more challenging on a daily basis,” Fonseca says. “At first, there was just a lot of uncertainty on both the patients’ part and our part as to how we should be managing our interactions.”

With physical distancing rules in place, the challenges included keeping surfaces clean and counselling clients on products without touching things or taking them off shelves.

Like Patel, Fonseca could feel the anxiety of the people he dealt with.

“I realized that patients in the community were really looking to us for some form of comfort or reassurance,” he says. “I felt like many of my patient interactions ended with the patient asking me how long this was going to go on, or if it was really that bad.”

While the pandemic and uncertainty around it continues, Patel said he has already learned some lasting lessons.

“We’ve introduced changes that I see persisting beyond the end of COVID,” he says. “For example, we didn’t offer deliveries, but we do so now and I don’t see that going away.”

The experience has also made him appreciate how his employees and the communities they work in have come together to meet the challenges.

“We’ve felt the support of our neighbourhood the whole time – from donated lunches and customers saying how thankful they are to my team members demonstrating flexibility and staying positive,” Patel says. “This experience has brought out the best in all of us.”