Charitable Pharmacy

Stop by the Charitable Pharmacy’s satellite location –tucked inside the SVDP thrift store in Western Hills – and you’re likely to have Clinical Pharmacist Katie Owens greet you at the pharmacy window with a smile. “I love the mission. I really feel called to do this type of work,” Owens says.

Owens now leads all pharmacy operations for the Western Hills location, where roughly 27% of the 70,856 free prescriptions that the Charitable Pharmacy dispensed last year were distributed.

Owens and her team work closely with patients to not only ensure that they have access to their vital medications, but also to monitor how effectively those medications are helping them manage chronic diseases. SVDP staff regularly call their patients to check in, and connect them with tools and resources they may need, ranging from primary care appointments to healthy food from the Catino Choice Food Pantry. “You just wouldn’t be able to do that in a typical retail pharmacy,” Owens says.

The trust and personal relationships that pharmacists build with their patients has been a major factor in the Charitable Pharmacy’s success since it was launched in 2006, saving local healthcare systems $27 million in cost avoidance.

“I’m proud that our patients feel safe here,” Owns says. “There are so many who have nowhere else to go.”

In recognition of her commitment to providing excellent pharmaceutical care, along with her leadership of SVDP’s innovative tobacco cessation program and drug procurement process, Katie Owens was recognized as 2022’s Pharmacist of the Year by the Charitable Healthcare Network and the Ohio Department of Health.

Thanks to the generous support of the community, the model of service that Katie has helped build from the ground up – a pharmacy within a thrift store –will be replicated in 2023 when SVDP opens a third Charitable Pharmacy location in its Milford thrift store. To read more about this effort, turn to page 27.