Pharmacists shaken but back to work

PHARMACY staff at two pharmacies in the Victorian town of Mansfield near the epicentre of yesterday’s magnitude 5.8 earthquake were quick to pick up stock and carry on.

Mansfield Pharmacy proprietor, Cathy Henry, told Pharmacy Daily, that the incident was “scary to say the least”, with team members initially unsure of what was happening.

“Different things went through all of our heads,” she said.

“First we thought, ‘Gee, that’s a big truck that must be rumbling past’.

“It sounded like a giant stomping on our roof, then the walls were shaking and stock started falling off the shelves.

“It just kept going, so we thought we’d all better get outside... it was like slow motion.

“It was going for a good few minutes... [but] once it stopped, it stopped, we picked the stock back up and carried on.

“We’re hearing there are tier one and tier 2 [COVID-19 exposure] sites in Mansfield today [Wed] so that’s probably more of a worry for us than the earthquake.”

A spokesperson for Eisner’s Guardian Pharmacy, told Pharmacy Daily yesterday, that all staff and patients who were in the store at the time were safe and well following the earthquake.

“The pharmacy remains unaffected, fully operational and will continue providing healthcare to the Mansfield community as normal today,” the spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, with tremors from the earthquake radiating across much of the south east of the country, Pharmacy Guild of Australia Victorian Branch President, Anthony Tassone, described a 12-year-old patient who was receiving his first dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine when Melbourne rumbled, as “cool as a cucumber” in a post on Twitter.