Rural pharmacy pushes ahead with community-boosting plans in the face of a pandemic

Working in a bunker, setting up a new lifestyle coaching service and planning a full store refit were just a few of the things achieved by Gemma Perry and her team at Sanders Pharmacy in Te Awamutu in 2020.

These wins helped Sanders Pharmacy to be crowned Pharmacy Guild Community pharmacy of the year at the New Zealand Primary Healthcare Awards | He Tohu Mauri Ora last month. Co-located with Mahoe Medical Centre, the pharmacy serves a population of 20,000 in the rural Waikato and is open seven days and late nights.

Ms Perry says 2020 was a “rollercoaster”, mostly taken up with the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Winning the award was encouraging after such a hard year.

Ms Perry also pays tribute to the other finalist – Rotorua’s Ranolf Pharmacy led by Charlotte Schimanski. She describes Ms Schimanski as an “inspiring leader” who does amazing work in her community.

“I’m glad it was two independent pharmacies run by passionate women in the running for the award.”

All of us go to work every day because we love helping people

Now 37, Ms Perry first bought into Sanders Pharmacy at age 25 in 2010 in partnership with the now-retired former owners of Unichem Morrinsville, Maureen Horan and Paul Vester. Ms Perry bought them out and became the sole owner in 2014.

Before that, she worked for Ms Horan and Mr Vester ever since interning at their pharmacy after graduating in 2006.

Working in Morrinsville, Ms Perry developed a love for rural pharmacy. “Maureen and Paul were really amazing people to work for, they really encouraged me to become a business owner,” she says.

These days, Ms Perry is assisted in making strategic decisions for the business by dispensary manager Gail Karam and senior pharmacist Allison Gallagher.

Her husband, keen cyclist and ­marketing expert Lester Perry, periodically helps out as well.

Back in February and early March last year, when news of community spread of COVID-19 broke, the team at Sanders Pharmacy jumped into action.

They split their team of 20 into separate shifts, used counters to close the store to customers and created a temporary walk-in zone for customers a week before the country went into Alert Level 4 lockdown.

Then, in collaboration with Ms Perry’s brother’s company, Fiasco, the pharmacy came up with a series of portable screens to block off the front of the store.
These were installed 24 hours before lockdown.

“We were watching international commentary, and in particular the exponential rise in UK cases, which prompted us to very quickly make some drastic changes,” Ms Perry says.

“We had to reduce the risk to our staff and stay open.”

In those early days of the pandemic, Ms Perry says the Pharmacy Guild was very helpful, with chief executive Andrew Gaudin even phoning before 6am one Sunday morning to hear how things were for staff on the front line.

“There was an absence in the very early days of clear guidelines on whether there was PPE coming, or if the DHBs would be requiring us to be open, and information changing very quickly. So, we had to make a lot of assumptions and go with our gut, while our organisations were in the background trying very hard to get clarity for us,” she says.

Her team kept working behind the screen setup, which quickly became known as the “the bunker”, for the duration of the lockdown. A customer satisfaction survey conducted later in the year shows the community approved of how seriously Sanders Pharmacy took the COVID-19 threat.

For most pharmacies, just dealing with the greater workload and stress was enough of a challenge, but Sanders Pharmacy also launched a new service and proceeded with expansion plans, despite the chaos.

After attending a preventive care conference, the team trained up one of their dispensary technicians, Vicki Macky, as a PreCure lifestyle coach. Ms Macky now offers private weight-loss and diabetes management counselling to patients referred by GPs.

The GP clinic is also adding two staff members through the PreCure programme and plans are under way to launch a joint type 2 diabetes-reversal clinic between the pharmacy and GP clinic.

While patients now pay for counselling, Ms Perry says she would love to get funding for the service.

“There is a huge population group that could benefit.”

The pharmacy team also spent the year planning a store-wide refit, which will take place soon, and will be opening a second pharmacy in a new health hub in nearby Cambridge along with a new medical centre being opened by Mahoe Med.

In addition, the pharmacy offers a wide range of services, including counselling for SSRIs and childhood asthma (targeted to Māori and Pacific people), and works in close coordination with Mahoe Med.

So why do Ms Perry and her team do it?

“We can see that our pharmacy and our pharmacists have a huge impact with our patients,” she says.

“All of us go to work every day because we love helping people.

“But we don’t just want to do what everyone else does, we want to keep pushing the envelope.”