August 27, 2018
What do you think your pharmacy means to your community?
You can get a prescription filled anywhere, but you can’t get reliable, friendly, compassionate service everywhere. That is what Shatto’s Frontier Drug provides. The community knows they can depend on us. Each of our employees has a special group of patients and customers that come into the pharmacy just because that employee works here. We know and interact with most of the medical providers in town personally. People in our community have grown to expect our personal care, and new people moving into the community have found our service to be a very pleasant surprise. We at Shatto’s Frontier Drug feel we would be truly missed if we were not here. That’s when you know you are truly locally loved.
What does your community mean to you?
This community is where my parents and grandparents lived. It is where I was born and where my wife and I raised our children. It’s where all our employees have raised their families, and where all of us volunteer, work and interact every day with our friends and neighbors. It’s a community where you can be in the grocery store or walk down the sidewalk and be called by your first name. It’s watching kids of all ages participating in athletics and swimming at the local water park. It’s free community picnics at the local parks and hunting, fishing and camping in the mountains and at the lake.
Our community consists of farming and ranching intertwined with the mineral industry. It’s going to the State Fair and watching the 4H and FFA students show their livestock, or watching an outdoor concert. It is where you can watch a free movie outdoors on the side of the famous train locomotive at the Chamber of Commerce park. It’s a place where you must chase the antelope off the local golf course before you can play. It is going through the good and bad times with the residents of our community and giving and getting a hug when it is needed. It is watching the free fireworks display and everyone standing for the National Anthem. It’s proving there really is such a thing as a hometown. That is what my community means to me, and we are proud to be part of their health care.
How does your pharmacy and staff go above and beyond simply filling prescriptions to care for the patients in your community?
Besides filling prescriptions, we offer immunizations, medication therapy management, synchronization of prescriptions, home delivery, help with selecting Medicare Part D plans and instruction on using blood glucometers. We implemented the Healthy Kids Free Vitamin program that offers free vitamins to children, and we leave birthday wishes and refill reminders on our patients’ phones. We have an adherence program to help patients remember to take and pick up their meds. We specialize in just knowing when someone needs a little compassion and a friendly hug. We try to treat our patients the way we would want to be treated and how we would want our parents and grandparents to be treated.
How have you and your team incorporated new and innovative practices that differentiate your pharmacy as a leader in patient care?
We answer the phone and don’t rely on IVRs. We will open after hours and on holidays, and the local providers have our personal cell phone numbers in their personal cell phones. The other pharmacies and the local providers send the prescriptions to us when it’s something that’s out of the ordinary or going to take extra time to deal with because they know we will do our best to take care of the problem. We work with the local hospital to help with their formulary and computer software changes. We take care of the hospitals 340B program. We participate in the local health fairs and have our pharmacists give talks at the schools and local senior center. We have sent pharmacists to patients’ homes to show them how to use their inhalers. We constantly drive out of town, sometimes a hundred miles round-trip, to find a medication or ostomy item that we do not have.
My wife, Jan, recently helped an elderly patient who was being scammed and was wanting a prepaid gift card to send to an individual who had conned the patient into believing he owed the person money. We called the police, and after they got involved they were able to freeze the patient’s bank account and block the caller’s phone numbers. The patient’s relatives came in and thanked us for taking the time to stop the scam. If we had not been willing to get out from behind the counter and talk with this patient, he would not have been helped. Patient care does not always involve just their medication issues.
