Mitchell Trezise, Pharmacy Manager, believes building trust and rapport with their local medical centre is key to being able to respond to the changing need of the Yaldhurst community.
Kiwi Pharmacy and Inspire Health Medical share their building with a range of other health professionals. “We’re working collaboratively in terms of processes, and we have informal collaboration as well. We’re able to reflect on experiences that the doctors have had and we’ve had. We use messaging apps to communicate back and forth quickly.”
One of the highlights of the collaboration between the pharmacy and the practice has been around the COVID-19 vaccination rollout.
“During the August lockdown we saw quite a surge in people’s demand to get vaccinated or swabbed. The pharmacy and the GP practice were already working collaboratively for medicine provision. To ensure that we met the needs of the public, we had to recognise how we could support each other in the clinic. The GPs were able to offer and they had the funding for the swabbing, and we had the manpower for scaling up the vaccination service. So, it allowed us to focus on one task each, essentially, during that first period anyway. Just so that we could work out the processes well, upscale it and now at this point we’re both working almost in tandem.”
Inspire Health Medical Practice Manager, Doris Chua, appreciates the efficiencies her GPs have gained from this collaboration. “We only do a few in-house vaccinations here for those patients that would prefer us to administer it, so it’s very helpful having the pharmacy in the same building to direct our patients to.
“It’s been a really useful partnership because we rely on them when we have patients with issues or questions regarding the vaccine. We’re able to direct our patients to the pharmacy for answers.”
The suburb of Yaldhurst has a vaccination uptake rate of 95%, which Mitchell describes as ‘validating’. “We feel very privileged to be in a position to be able to offer it to the community.”
Read the full December newsletter.