Archive for the ‘PCD Programs’ Category

While Joe and I were at the NCPA (National Community Pharmacists Association) annual meeting in Philadelphia, we sat in on a marketing program and one of the things the speaker introduced us to was “The 3/50 Project.”

The 3/50 Project asks which local or independent stores in your community would you MISS if they suddenly disappeared?

They also state that “for every $100 spent in locally owned independent stores, $68 returns to the community through taxes, payroll, and other expenditures. If you spend that in a national chain, only $43 stays here. Spend it online and nothing comes home.”

The 3/50 Project asks you to choose three local businesses and spend $50 in those stores to save your local economy.

Joe and I are just starting a shop local program in the pharmacy, so be on the look out for more information on that. We will have signs, stickers, and bag stuffers explaining why we think it is important to shop locally. Additionally, we have asked our employees to “shop locally,” and we’ve put our money into encouraging them to do that. Joe has officially made the two dollar bill the local currency for Plain City. We gave each of our staff twenty-five two dollar bills with the only limit on their use being that they have to be spent in local businesses. As the weeks go by, we’re going to see if other Plain City shop owners notice an influx of two dollar bills in their cash registers. We hope this will show people just how much their money fuels our local economy.

At Plain City Druggist, we completely agree with the idea of The 3/50 Project and shopping locally. In the next month, Joe and I, as well as our staff, will be doing our best to spend $50 (in two dollar bills) in local businesses that we know we cannot live without. We’d ask you to consider doing the same. We also hope we are one of those businesses you would hate to lose.

As you know, we have a program built upon smiles. Our staff wear buttons that say, “If I don’t smile, these $2 are yours!” with a two dollar bill tucked behind the button. If the staff doesn’t smile while they are wearing this button, anyone who sees them with a grumpy face can claim the $2 for their own. We have not lost much money on this deal, because we have a lot of very pretty smiles in our pharmacy.

Not only does everyone at Plain City Druggist wear a smile, but we also extend that challenge out to the vendors and sales people who come in the store each day.

Our UPS guy is already a pretty positive person. He greets Joe each time he comes in with his favorite phrase, “I’m livin’ the dream!” He decided that he needed to wear one of our $2 buttons (actually, he thought it was something his boss could use). He and Margie modeled how to use the buttons appropriately–with giant grins on their faces. These buttons should never, ever be worn with a sour expression, unless you have an unlimited supply of two dollar bills. 

We always say that smiles are contagious. We are spreading our happiness and smiles to everyone we meet. In turn, those people pass the smiles out to everyone they come in contact with. We know our UPS guy carries a smile from the drugstore out into the world at every stop on his delivery route. No one is going to take his $2 either! He’s learned the valuable smile lesson from his cheerful friends at Plain City Druggist.

For the second year, we will be providing backpacks filled with selected school supplies to Jonathan Alder first and second graders. Using the school supply lists located on the Jonathan Alder School web sites, we chose items that we thought would be most needed by the students. 

The backpacks are free. They are our way of thanking the community for continually supporting us.  All that is required to obtain a backpack is to have a parent or guardian stop in the pharmacy and sign for the child. There is a limit of one backpack per child. Supplies are limited, so don’t wait!

Please drop by the pharmacy beginning on Monday, August 9, to pick up a backpack filled with supplies for your proud student. The smell of crayons will instantly put you and them in the “back-to-school” mood. It did us!

Most of you know that we have a separate pharmacy within Plain City Druggist. It is Midwestern Compounding Pharmacy, located in Suite 200 of the drugstore (which is the lab). We used to do all the compounding through Plain City Druggist, but as the compounding picked up, we decided to separate the compounding business from the regular “lick, stick, and pour” side of retail pharmacy, where we prepare prescriptions for the patients (this involves a lot of counting and dealing with insurance companies).

Compounding is a bit different.

It used to be that all pharmacies compounded. But nowadays, compounding has become more of an art and it takes more time. Because of this, many of the chain pharmacies often do not have the time to spend on compounding when they are filling large volumes of prescriptions.

Compounding involves making medications for patients that might not be available commercially from a larger drug company. Or the doctor might want a different dosage form or strength than what can be found lining the retail drug shelves. Or perhaps the patient cannot tolerate the medication in a certain format, so we change the way the drug is delivered. All of this must be done on a doctor’s orders.

We can make capsules, creams, ointments, solutions, suspensions, suppositories–you name it, we can pretty much figure out a way to make it. We can also make medications for pets and flavor them with tuna or liver or other delectable tastes to make it easier to medicate your finicky dog or cat. We can do the same thing with children, changing the flavors, of course, to more palatable tastes of grape or cherry or even chocolate silk pie.

This past week, our pharmacy student, Matt, also made chocolate troches (pronounce TRO-KEYS) for a lady to deliver her bio-identical hormones to her in a way that she could tolerate. We had fun making these troches, because we had to melt a Hershey bar for the base (Matt kept saying the lab smelled like Christmas). Then we added in the medication and poured the whole concoction into molds. The patient will then break off a small square of the chocolate and get her dose of medicine. We could have made the same medicine in a cream or even a capsule, but the patient liked the chocolate troche method (we can’t say that we blame her–what a sweet way to swallow your medicine) best.

We have also added a lady’s favorite perfume to her cream medication so a normally “medicinally smelling” cream will smell nice–after all, taking your medicine doesn’t have to be a bad experience.

We are members of PCCA–Professional Compounding Centers of America. We took classes at their facilities in Texas and we can call them any time if a problem arises that we have never dealt with.

We also had compounding classes in pharmacy school–an entire four quarters of lab work dealing just with making specialty medicines.

In the very near future, we hope to have a web site for Midwestern Compounding Pharmacy and market the compounding a bit more so that area doctors know what we can do.

In the meantime, if you have any questions about compounding, call Plain City Druggist or Midwestern, which has it’s own phone number: 614-733-DRUG (3784). Our motto for Midwestern Compounding Pharmacy is “We Solve Problems,” and that is exactly what we do for you, our patients.

Matt making chocolate troches.

You may have noticed the buttons that everyone in the store is wearing. They say, “If I don’t smile, these $2 are yours!”

And we are putting our money where our smile is. Go ahead. Try to catch anyone at Plain City Druggist without a smile on their face. We know you can’t do it. We know our money is safe. Because when we are in the pharmacy, even if we are having a bad day, our goal is to never let it show and to allow you to have the most pleasant experience possible. A smile brightens everyone’s day, especially the person who is smiling. A smile is part of our dress code.

So we challenge you to an impossible task. Try to take the $2 from anyone wearing one of these special buttons. You’ll have an easier time finding two dollars in change in the sofa cushions at home than you will finding an unhappy face at Plain City Druggist!