By Mark Squibb | Vol. 12 No. 20 (October 3, 2019)
A Goulds pharmacist has been recognised by the Pharmacists Association of Newfoundland and Labrador (PANL) as the province’s pharmacist of the year.
March is Pharmacy Awareness week and the PANL have a campaign where you can nominate your pharmacist as Pharmacist of the Year.
Pat Williams was named Pharmacist of the Year at a Pharmacists Association of Newfoundland and Labrador gala on Sept. 28.
Mark Squibb photo
Pat Williams was notified by PANL near the end of August that he was this year’s winner, but had to keep the secret close to the chest until the gala awards banquet on Saturday, Sept. 28.
“So it’s not a complete surprise, but they do ask you to keep it a secret until the gala,” he said.
He’s not sure if he received just the one nomination, or multiple, but he at least knows that he was nominated by a customer whom he served in Paradise.
“A lot of the time I went out of my way for him to take some of the stress off of him,” he explained.
“When we went to the store in Paradise and found out I was gone, he called me up…He transferred all his prescription here.”
He said that his team do their best to go above and beyond.
“We have an excellent team here,” he said. “We can do things that some of the other pharmacies can’t do. We can be more responsive to something outside of the regular business.”
Sometimes, that includes after hours deliveries.
“Another time I came in here on an evening and we were closed, and I checked the messages. A doctor had phoned in a prescription for a little girl in Petty Harbour. It was for an antibiotic. So I said, ‘Petty Harbour is only six kilometres away,’, so we filled the prescription and I brought it out. The parents were expecting it.
“Doing stuff like that is not always the norm, but it’s nice to do that for people. That’s where you get your satisfaction back is when you really help someone out … A lot of the bigger stores may not be able to offer those types of services or be as responsive.”
Originally from Petty Harbour, Williams bought the business in the Goulds from Pat O’ Keefe three years ago. He has worked in the pharmacy business for 28-years total, both as a pharmacist, manager, and teacher.
“Sometimes people are in a spot where they don’t have the knowledge or the support system to know how to move forward or to get better. And we are that. We are that knowledge. We give them the confidence of, ‘somebody is looking after me.’”
“Imagine if you’re a a young person, and you don’t know much about any diseases, and your doctor tells you you’re pre-diabetic. You walk out with a prescription, and you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Pharmacists, said Willaims, provide that critical follow-up.
Williams said it is a rewardin career, and also a challenging one, and that pharmacists are always having to evolve with changing practices.
“Most of the drugs we would have dispensed twenty years ago are not on the market now. There’s always new drugs, new procedures, or new information about old drugs that didn’t work in the first place.”
Add to that challenge in the individuality of each patient.
“Two people can be on the same medication, with different results,” he noted.
Despite the challenges, Williams loves the work which, according to the results, is good news for the roughly thousand individuals that Goulds Pharmacare serves.
