Michael Hewitson
Sandbags helped … sort of |
No one envisaged a drought coming at the same time as a flood.
But that is exactly what happened in parts of the UK last summer when
rivers broke their banks and supplies of drinking water were severely
disrupted.
Chaos reigned as thousands of people were evacuated from their
homes. Many houses and businesses were without power and water, and emergency
services were overrun.
Saintbridge Pharmacy in Gloucester is connected to the road and town
by a small bridge over a brook. There the water rose so quickly that
there
were only 20 minutes between the brook bursting its banks and the pharmacy
and adjoining medical centre being a foot deep in water.
Pharmacy manager
Michael Hewitson, remembers that Friday evening: “The surgery staff
started to get a bit worried about the rising waters and ordered some sandbags,
which arrived soon after. I was drafted by the surgery to build a sandbag
redoubt to help prevent the building from being flooded. This was never
part of my pharmacy training.”
People had been collecting prescriptions in the pharmacy at the time.
One customer, a young mother, was aided by pharmacy staff — who passed
the baby to her across the water — so that she could drive out before
the waters rose too high.
The staff shut the pharmacy and tried as best they could to barricade
the doors with sand bags, but to no avail — the water streamed through
the front door, under the shutters and sandbags. When it became clear that
it was no longer safe to take people across the bridge without the help
of the emergency services, Mr Hewitson moved everyone to higher ground,
into the surgery’s upstairs meeting room.
“It was a case of all hands on deck to try to save some of the surgery’s
paper notes,” he recalls. One of the patients, a woman with chronic
obstructive pulmonary disease, was having difficulty breathing as she became
more anxious. It was a tense moment. Because there was no electricity,
there would have been no way to provide nebulisation had she needed it.
So Mr Hewitson splashed his way back to the pharmacy, which was in darkness,
to retrieve spacers and metered-dose inhalers, just in case.
There was also a young baby who was ill with an infection and in need
of antibiotics. Again Mr Hewitson waded back to the pharmacy through
the water,
which by this time was two feet high — boxes floating everywhere — to
grab what was needed.
To Mr Hewitson and his team’s credit, Saintbridge Pharmacy was back
up and running the following Monday morning. On the down side, however,
the pharmacy lost its refrigerator, the entire contents of its Controlled
Drugs cupboard, and between £12,000 and £15,000 worth of stock.
Then they had the drought to contend with.
Álvaro Germán /Dreamstime.com
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“There was no water in
this part of Gloucestershire or any of our homes, which only complicated
matters as we were trying to obtain suitable supplies of bottled water
(with low sodium content to avoid harming young children when reconstituting
antibiotic suspensions).
“It was a real team effort but I think the patients
ultimately appreciated the fact that we kept going, even if conditions
weren’t exactly ideal for us or for them,” he added.
Mr Hewitson and his staff are also having to go through the whole rigmarole
of a refit. “The aftermath of the flood was probably more stressful
than the flood itself,” he says. “At the moment we are still
in a Portakabin awaiting the completion of our refit.”
Elsewhere in the UK, fellow pharmacists, their staff and patients are
also having to deal with the after effects of the flooding. Although
the flood
waters did not reach his pharmacy, David Sharp of Colosseum
Pharmacy in Bentley, near Doncaster, has felt their effects — the most significant
being the evacuation of a community.
“We lost a whole village,” he
says. Mr Sharp describes neighbouring Toll Bar, which the pharmacy serves,
as a ghost town even six months on and he predicts that customers will
not be back in their homes until well after Christmas.
Because these patients have been displaced, his pharmacy is delivering
prescriptions to them all over Doncaster. “We are still not back
to normal,” he told The Journal. “We are well down on prescription
figures because we still have 700 to 1,000 people missing from the community,
and quite a lot of those are elderly.”
Despite such hardship, Mr Sharp has nothing but praise for his local
primary care trust. A representative of the PCT visited the town’s two pharmacies
to see how they were coping and made arrangements to ensure people got
their medicines. “People were rushed out with 20 minutes’ notice
with nothing on them — not even a change of clothes,” Mr Sharp
recalls.
Pharmacists’ place within the communities they serve is well known
and this is never more apparent than when disaster strikes. UK pharmacists
are to be commended for their continued work in making sure that people
have their medicines, come rain, hail or
shine.
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The
Pharmaceutical Journal