Porirua pharmacy stalwart scoops top technician prize

Reliability through trying times and showing initiative are the hallmarks of New Zealand’s top pharmacy technician for 2021.

Sonya Scrimshaw, a technician at Life Pharmacy North City in Porirua, won the ProPharma Community pharmacy technician of the year award at the New Zealand Primary Healthcare Awards | He Tohu Mauri Ora last month.

Ms Scrimshaw has been a technician for about 15 years but that has not always been her career.

Originally from Featherston, her first job out of school was working in admin for the Ministry of Defence. She married a sailor, Mark Scrimshaw, and the couple moved to Devonport in Auckland for his work in the Royal New Zealand Navy, where Ms Scrimshaw also found employment.

I’m an organiser. I like things to be neat and tidy

Following her husband’s work also saw Ms Scrimshaw living briefly in Australia and then moving to Palmerston North in 2001.

In Palmerston North, Ms Scrimshaw found there was less demand for her administration skill set.

In 2005, she decided to change careers and undertook a retail course through the Universal College of Learning and a pharmacy technician course via correspondence through the Open Polytechnic. Since then, Ms Scrimshaw has worked at four pharmacies as a technician and has been in her current role at Life Pharmacy North City for five years after she and her husband moved to nearby Whitby.

“We were lucky, it was a good time for buying houses and we could afford the move,” she says.

Working at Life Pharmacy North City has given Ms Scrimshaw a chance to showcase her reliability.

Due to constant management changes at the pharmacy, she has worked under five separate managers.

“It just came about [because] some people were travelling a long way to work, others found better opportunities elsewhere.”

The changes meant at the time, Ms Scrimshaw was the only full-time staff member and the only one with a long-term knowledge of patients.

To help share her knowledge on days when she was not working, she came up with a labelling system using pharmacy ­dispensing software Toniq that allowed staff to attach notes to patients or medicines, which would remind other users of specific information when they accessed it.

Ms Scrimshaw’s initiative and organisational skills also came to the fore during the frantic period of medicines stockpiling that occurred just before the Alert Level 4 lockdown in March last year.

Script numbers rose massively and more staff were put on to cope, which resulted in the dispensary becoming extremely crowded.

Ms Scrimshaw rearranged the pharmacy with large display tables at the entrance for prescription collection and large labelled boxes under the table for easy access, making work less stressful and eliminating tripping hazards.

Despite her improvements, Ms Scrimshaw still describes the period as “madness”. In addition to more scripts, staff hours were reduced so everyone was trying to fit eight hours’ work into six hours.

Ms Scrimshaw says she loves her job, especially the contact with customers.

“They are almost like an extended family.” She also believes her temperament is well suited to being a pharmacy technician.

“I’m an organiser. I like things to be neat and tidy.” Outside work, she has no children and is a self-described home body, enjoying arts and crafts. Winning the award was “a heck of an honour”, she says.