Dermot Smyth owner of Slane Pharmacy and Tullyallen Pharmacy.

‘Pandemic reinforced our role in the community’

A SLANE based pharmacist has said that that being at the coalface of the pandemic ensuring the health needs of customers have been met for the past year has given him and his team a new-found energy and passion for their role in the community.

Dermot Smyth owner of Slane Pharmacy and Tullyallen Pharmacy commented that although it has been a worrying time for local entrepreneurs, it has reinforced the vital role, pharmacies play in the community and given him a chance to remodel his business. He said:

“We have had so much change in our working lives since last march in our pharmacies. I have found it a very rewarding period in the work place, you are helping people and going back to basics, being there and giving a good service.

“I have watched my team develop into a formidable unit - each one rising in different ways to challenges and surprising me positively in so many different ways

“It has been stressful at times and you are very worried for your staff and your family but the amount of people who have been genuinely grateful for helping them out has really made it worthwhile.

“I’m a pharmacist a long time and it has just given me a bit of energy to keep going.”

Dermot and his team launched a new website during lockdown and has had orders from all over the world as he explains:

“We've launched a new e -commerce platform www.fivestarpharmacy.ie and changed the way we work to make sure our patients get access to medicines when they need it.

“I had been talking about it for the last while saying we have to go digital, this is the way forward and the pandemic really drove us on to do it.

“We have had orders from Australia, America, The UK, Germany. We even had an order from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil but we actually couldn’t ship it because Brazil’s borders were closed at the time it was at the height of covid in the first lockdown.

“It is going from strength to strength.”