When Heather Snook first arrived in Alberta, she had a business degree in hand, but her professional interests led her to pharmacy. She began working in a pharmacy in 2009 and became a pharmacy technician in 2013. After practising for several years in both national chain and locally owned pharmacies, Heather began to formulate an idea.
“I just thought, hey, I could do this. I could own my own pharmacy,” she said. “It was always in the back of my mind, but I needed the right pharmacist to be my partner, because I couldn’t do it all on my own.”
Since pharmacy technicians are not able to be a licensee, Heather needed a pharmacist she could trust to become her business partner. She partnered with pharmacist and co-worker Katrina Wilson-Kubota, and the two opened their own community pharmacy, including a licence to provide compounding and repackaging services to other pharmacies, in Spruce Grove in June 2020. Katrina is the licensee of the community pharmacy; Heather is the proprietor’s representative. As a pharmacy technician, Heather faced some obstacles to make it happen.
“Not being a pharmacist, I do feel like there were some challenges,” said Heather. “Some feel pharmacists should be doing everything. That was kind of a barrier that I crossed in that I’m a pharmacy technician and a pharmacy owner. Katrina and I proved people wrong. Women can be owners. Pharmacy technicians can be owners. There’s a lot of people who respect us for that and come to our pharmacy to support us.”
Most importantly, Heather has always felt support from her business partner.
“Katrina was right there like, ‘You can do this, you can do that,’” said Heather. “She supported me wholeheartedly. And I think that’s where we jive. We just feed off each other that way.”
Katrina believes Heather’s success fulfilling the responsibilities of the proprietor’s representative is proof that pharmacy technicians can take on more responsibilities in pharmacy—something that has been enabled in ACP’s new Standards for the Operation of Licensed Pharmacies. Within the standards, the role of an operations supervisor was added to enable licensees to delegate administrative, managerial, and operational duties to a pharmacy technician or pharmacist. Delegating leadership roles to qualified regulated members supports effective operations and, in turn, promotes quality patient care.
An operations supervisor may, under the direction of the licensee, oversee the operational management of a licensed pharmacy including compliance with policies and procedures, human resource duties such as hiring and scheduling of pharmacy staff, and training and orientation of pharmacy staff.
“Heather is basically doing a lot of it already because of the setup that we have,” said Katrina. “As a pharmacist, I want to step more into the clinical role. I want to do an appointment-based model with patients, so I need someone to run the staffing levels, for example. I think that’s a huge bonus for all of us if pharmacy technicians can take on more roles.”
For more about Heather and Katrina, read the full story in the ACP 2024-25 Annual Report.
