When Rafiq Salehmohamed and Molly McAllister open their new Fort Smith pharmacy next month, it’ll be named for their son. Sort of.
They’ve chosen the name Red Fox Pharmacy for their business, which they expect to open next to Berro’s Pizzeria on August 18.
“It’s from my son. He just loves red foxes. He has a red fox toque and a red fox scarf,” Salehmohamed told Cabin Radio.
“We really think of red foxes when we think of our son. So it’s kinda-sorta named after him.”
After a decade in Fort Smith – a town they have come to love – Salehmohamed and McAllister see opening an independent pharmacy as professional growth, an expression of their dedication to the community, and a means of providing continuity of care.
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“We hit that point where we loved living in Fort Smith and we were like, ‘We’re going stay here long term.’ And it had always been a dream of mine to own my own pharmacy,” said Salehmohamed, who was the managing pharmacist at Wally’s Drugs for the past nine years.
“So since we made that decision that we were going to stay, why not do it?”
McAllister points to the town’s reliance on locum doctors as a reason to put down roots and offer a pharmacy where the staff know every patient.
Locums are doctors who come from elsewhere to fill in for short periods, rather than moving to a community and staying there. They are a necessary part of the NWT’s healthcare system, which does not have enough resident doctors.
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“Don’t get me wrong, we’ve got great locum doctors, but there’s still that change in care,” McAllister said.
“Rafiq’s been the pharmacist here for almost a decade, so he’s seen people’s journeys. He knows what they’ve gone through and what they need.
“I think having that continuity of care is really important, and I think we really feel it as members of the community, that frustration when you don’t have that care. So we want to be a stable part of the community and be able to provide services.”
‘A billion cameras pointed at us’
Renovations in the unit that will house the pharmacy are well under way – and the building is changing at the same time as the rules for pharmacists are changing.
The NWT government has been updating legislation and introducing regulations that are intended to increase the range of services pharmacists can offer.
Salehmohamed expects the changes to allow pharmacists to initiate and renew prescriptions (rather than simply dispensing prescriptions once patients have received them from a doctor), as well as offer vaccinations.
He is looking forward to offering appointment-based consultations, which is why the Red Fox unit has a dedicated, private consulting room.
Offering vaccinations “is a really big one that we’re excited to be able to do,” he said, “and we’ll be able to help a lot with offloading workload.”
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Unusually, the couple had the opportunity to road-test their elevator pitch about the new pharmacy to two special guests earlier this week.
They were among the families in the room when Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier RJ Simpson visited Fort Smith’s community centre.
Carney and Simpson sat down with the family for a couple of minutes.
The family meets Prime Minister Mark Carney and Premier RJ Simpson. Ollie Williams/Cabin Radio
“At first I was like, ‘Oh God, this is going to be awkward. There are a billion cameras pointed at us and I don’t know what to say to this man,’ but he luckily really steered the conversation,” McAllister said of the prime minister.
“He asked how our summer is going, so we brought up that we’re opening a pharmacy. They were talking about how new businesses are what we need, and we couldn’t agree more that that’s what’s good for our communities, to have small, locally owned businesses and more entrepreneurs.”
McAllister said seeing Red Fox “finally becoming a reality is amazing.”
“We love being here,” she said.
“It’s where we decided to raise our kids, and we just want to be able to provide the best healthcare service possible to the people who live here.”
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