Corum comes to rural rescue

CORUM Health came to the aid of a pharmacy in rural Victoria earlier this year, when a water pipe burst and threatened to completely destroy the business.

The heritage building housing Avoca Gold Chemist in remote Avoca (see map above) had the pipe burst at the worst possible time - late on Friday night - with water inundating the pharmacy all weekend and the disaster only discovered by the locum pharmacist 60 hours later, on the following Monday morning.

About half the stock was destroyed, along with paper files and records while the computers and other equipment around the dispensary ended up saturated.

Avoca Gold Chemist is the only pharmacy in the town, and staff had to quickly figure out how to restart operations as soon as possible.

The pharmacy’s business manager Marilyn Smith contacted her account manager at Corum Health, Peter Simaris, who gallantly drove from Melbourne to Avoca the following day with a new Safeguard system to replace one destroyed.

He used the six-year-old POS computer - which fortunately missed the flood - to set up LOTS dispense for the pharmacy.

The solid-state drive was rescued from the saturated Safeguard, and with no moving parts it booted up immediately so no patient records were lost and the pharmacy was able to resume dispensing.

Smith said “there’s obviously a reason the system is called Safeguard Plus, as it protected our files and facilitated the fast resumption of trading within three days of the flood.

“tithout Peter’s personal dedication and commitment, I’m not sure how long we would have been out of business... the town depends on our pharmacy for medication so it was important we were operational as soon as possible,” she said.