It’s often said that when you live in a small town, everyone knows everyone. That may be an exaggeration, but it’s also the reason that Gibbons is so well served by its pharmacy teams.
Katlyn Steventon grew up in the town, and when she graduated from the pharmacy program at the University of Alberta in 2020, she went back to practise there. Knowing the community as she did, she was well aware of the health challenges residents could face.
“We do have several physicians, but they’re very busy and they’re hard to get in to see,” she said. “We’re about 20 minutes north of Edmonton, so for people who don’t drive it’s hard to get to appointments and see physicians.”
Overflow from the busy physicians was also ending up at the nearby Redwater Health Centre, where people would wait hours to get simple conditions confirmed and receive treatment. A short time after she started working at Gibbons Remedy’s Rx, Katlyn was presented the opportunity to become the licensee of the pharmacy and decided to take action.
“The other pharmacy in town has been around for 35 years, I believe, and they are extremely busy,” she said. “We have the same owners, so I asked the licensee of that store if they would be open to doing strep tests or anything. They said we don’t have staffing or time to be able to offer that much, but I did, so I was like, okay I’ll start offering that service.”
Katlyn adapted the pharmacy’s workflow to add strep throat testing, but divided the labour so that others could assist her. Pharmacy technicians and assistants were trained on a screening form to work through with patients and would start a file in the system, then she would conduct the tests, read the results, and make clinical recommendations.
As Katlyn left the pharmacy for a parental leave, pharmacist Nicole Kinnear joined the team after graduating from the University of Alberta in 2024. She could immediately see the results of small-town word of mouth spreading the news that testing was available at the pharmacy.
“It very much depends on the season, but at times like back to school you might have one to four people every day, which for our small community is quite a bit,” Nicole said. “It comes in waves, where when we have one person who comes up positive, then we start having other people show up or a whole school class will all come, that sort of thing.”
And it wasn’t just people talking. The other pharmacy in Gibbons began to refer patients for testing, and the local physicians took note and began recommending patients get testing done there. The pharmacy also undertook COVID testing during the pandemic and serves as a collection site for opioid dependency patients to drop their samples.
At the same time, the pharmacists knew where others were better positioned to help their patients and collaborated in different ways.
“I had looked into us doing A1C and that kind of stuff because I do have my [Certified Diabetes Educator],” said Katlyn, “but there is a lab literally two doors down from us where they are very accommodating, and we can give [patients] lab requisitions for that so that there is no additional cost.”
When Katlyn moved on to work with Alberta Health Services, Nicole took over as the pharmacy’s licensee. She made sure to continue the testing, preserving a key resource for the community and contributing to the betterment of the health system overall.
“Partially it’s about convenience for people, but it also helps with taking pressure off of Redwater Health Centre and prevents people from having to sit hours and hours in a hospital,” said Nicole. “I can give them a quick test and get them treatment faster.”
Thanked for her and her team’s work, Nicole is quick to defer the original credit to Katlyn.
“I want to commend Katlyn because I really feel like because she’s from here, it was her care for the community and the patients that started all this.”
