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32 PHARMACY PROFILE TERRYWHITE CHEMMART HORNSBY, SYDNEY PHARMACY SERVICES ABOVE AND BEYOND FAST FACTS Name: Sandhya Kurimeti, Pharmacist Manager. How long have you been a pharmacist? 10 years. How long have you operated at your current pharmacy? Five years. Does your pharmacy offer professional services? Yes. What kind of customers does your pharmacy attract? Elderly, young families, busy professionals. What is the most successful OTC category in your pharmacy and why? Gastrointestinal – apparently a lot of people in the Hornsby region have IBS symptoms! Describe your day-to-day challenges and how you overcome them. We offer a lot of services and the biggest challenge now is providing all the services to the best of our ability, while also maintaining exceptional customer service to all our script customers. To do this, we make sure that all our staff are highly skilled and constantly learning. What has been your most satisfying moment in the pharmacy? Supplying EpiPens to a customer with peanut anaphylaxis who was travelling to South America during the height of the EpiPen shortage. It took a few hours to source just one EpiPen for this poor girl who was almost in tears when she couldn’t find one. The look of relief and gratitude on her face when she found out we’d been able to source one for her was highly satisfying. IBy Emily Devon. n a busy part of northern Sydney amid schools, colleges, parks and gardens sits TerryWhite Chemmart (TWC) Hornsby, whose Pharmacist Manager Sandhya Kurimeti is full of praise for her team’s hard work, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic to keep the community reassured in terms of available health products and crucial information. For this month’s issue, Retail Pharmacy spoke with Ms Kurimeti about her own career highlights, as well as the Hornsby pharmacy’s journey, achievements, upgrades and plans. One of her career highlights was the success of TWC Hornsby’s first involvement with the sleep apnoea treatment, continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP). She recalls “watching our first CPAP patient undergo his trial and getting to share his amazing experience of better sleep quality and transformational weight loss – he lost 12kg over four weeks, just due to CPAP”. Additionally, “honing my Webster packaging and checking skills by working in a pharmacy that serviced six nursing homes” is a career highlight for Ms Kurimeti. Another is TWC Hornsby receiving a dispensing robot. She also cites: “knowing I’m part of an incredible service-based team who are so committed to going above and beyond for our patients”. Working beyond limitations Ms Kurimeti reflects on the restrictions the pharmacy was faced with when the pandemic began, and the positives that resulted from them. “We moved to a ‘team A and team B’ staff roster, which meant we were working with limited staff on each day,” she said. “Our delivery service suddenly became the hot new thing, but our in-store customer base dwindled. We suddenly had a lot more time on our hands. “In some ways, this was good because we underwent the biggest store refit that we’ve done, so having the time and space to create that change was awesome. We also got to hone our procedures to make sure that when we were back to full capacity we were running as smoothly as possible. “We had a lot of stock changes as well. Suddenly some of our best performing OTC areas were looking extremely overstocked, such as cold and flu and ‘glasshouse’ (no one was going out, so no gifts were being given!)” RETAIL PHARMACY • MAY 2021