Pharmacy Care Clinic: the words are presented in large white letters above, while a vivid yellow banner hangs just below, inviting customers to “check-in” for their health-care appointment, in a setting not unlike what patients would expect at a doctor’s office.
This is not a doctor’s office at all. Instead, the clinic is located within a typical retail-store pharmacy layout, and the health professional who will be seeing the patient is a community pharmacist, authorized to assess, diagnose and prescribe for a range of 21 minor ailments in British Columbia, in addition to providing a variety of health-care services including administering vaccines, reviewing medications, providing point-of-care tests, and more.
British Columbia's first Shoppers Drug Mart Pharmacy Care Clinic opened in April 2024 in Kelowna, at 1030 Frost Road. The clinic is equipped with three consultation rooms, a waiting area, and a dedicated reception desk.
These Pharmacy Care Clinics and their bright orange banners are quickly becoming a common sight across Canada. As of Aug. 1, 2025, Shoppers Drug Mart has opened six pharmacy clinics in British Columbia, with plans for a total of 11 by the end of the year. Pharmacy care clinics in British Columbia have become a “key focus” for Shoppers Drug Mart, the company said, and the openings are part of its latest pharmacy clinic expansion. Across Canada, Shoppers Drug Mart launched 78 clinics in 2024, and expects to have opened more than 250 by the end of this year. All new Shoppers Drug Mart locations being built in the future will be equipped with such a clinic, the company said.
The clinic rooms are adjacent to the traditional pharmacy dispensary counters in Shoppers Drug Mart stores. The clinics are staffed with dedicated employees, typically at least one pharmacist, who serves as the health practitioner who will see the patient, and a pharmacy care concierge, who provides reception and administrative services for the clinic. Often, the clinics are located close to, but not sharing the same space, as the traditional dispensary counter.
The strategy for these clinics was born in 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The company said it observed how physicians became strained by the demand for health care during the pandemic, as the population got older and more people lived with health conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. This was a strong signal that more primary care services were needed, and the signal came at a time when multiple provinces were beginning to enable — or in some cases, had enabled for years — pharmacists to prescribe for routine health conditions, a prerequisite authorization that had previously been the domain of other health professions, such as medical doctors.
Meet the team at the Kelowna Pharmacy Care Clinic: Holly Sumner (left), Associate Owner and pharmacist, and Vanessa Hutchinson, Pharmacy Care Concierge.
British Columbia itself authorized pharmacists to see patients to diagnose and prescribe for minor ailments in June 2023. With the success of the clinics in other provinces, this scope expansion, along with the province enabling pharmacists to order labs, adapt more medications and offer more vaccines in community pharmacies, encouraged the company’s Pharmacy Care Clinic expansion on the West Coast.
British Columbia’s first Shoppers Drug Mart Pharmacy Care Clinic is in Kelowna’s Upper Mission neighbourhood, on the city’s southeast face to the Okanagan Lake. It’s an area that the store’s Associate Owner Holly Sumner described as a health-care desert — mostly residential with few commercial buildings, and very little health-care presence. It seemed the perfect place for a pharmacy to fill the need.
Sumner was also an ideal pharmacist to oversee B.C.’s first clinic. She is a University of Alberta graduate with nearly 30 years of experience, and Alberta is where she spent her first years practicing. Alberta has for years been seen as the Canadian province where pharmacists have the greatest scope of practice, and the profession there has long been able to provide clinical services such as diagnosing conditions and writing prescriptions. Unsurprisingly, Alberta is also the province with more Shoppers Drug Mart Pharmacy Care Clinics, at 110 locations, than the rest of the country combined.
“When the Pharmacy Care Clinic idea came up for B.C., I was thrilled. I had already heard that our company’s first Pharmacy Care Clinic, in Lethbridge, Alta., was super successful and took a huge weight off the health-care system there,” Sumner said.
“The general consensus among health-care workers right now is that everybody is overworked. There are physician shortages and long wait-times at clinics. As pharmacists, we’re here to help by taking care of the simple cases, the cold sores, the UTIs, birth control prescriptions, and I’ve talked to quite a few health-care workers in the community who are quite happy our clinic is now here.”
The Lethbridge store has been held as a success story. The Shoppers Drug Mart clinic there sees anywhere between 14,000 and 22,000 patients per year, and since its opening in 2022, the company said low acuity emergency department visits at the city’s Chinook Regional Hospital declined by 40 per cent, a positive trend that the clinic’s operations supported alongside other initiatives.
Being such a new store, the numbers aren’t quite that impressive in Kelowna, just yet. Sumner’s clinic has three private consultation rooms and is open every weekday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. There’s a dedicated phone line for the pharmacy clinic. And during its operation hours, there is a full-time pharmacist, and the reception desk is staffed by a former pharmacy assistant, Vanessa Hutchinson, who now works under her new title of Pharmacy Care Concierge.
An average day might have 10 pre-booked appointments, Hutchinson said, and walk-ins are often patients of opportunity — a customer browsing for eyedrops in the retail shelves might approach the counter for advice, up to that point unaware that a pharmacist is immediately available to see them for a health consult.
“There is usually no waiting,” said Hutchinson. “I would let the pharmacist know what the patient is here for, and it only takes a couple of moments before they are sitting down.”
Across B.C., in the year after pharmacists were enabled to write prescriptions, more than 310,000 patients visited a pharmacy for either a minor ailment assessment or a prescription for contraceptives. To date, the vast majority of community pharmacies in the province have not repurposed themselves into walk-in clinic spaces, though there are a few that have, or were purposely constructed to include a clinic, like Sumner’s.
Inside one of the three consultation rooms at the Kelowna Pharmacy Care Clinic.
Sumner’s clinic is equipped with a children’s room and a specialized weight scale for infants. There are lipid, A1C and strep testers, so patients can get a health check and receive immediate results. Additionally, the clinic space handles all vaccine and other injection-drug administration work, medication reviews, prescription renewals and other non-dispensing services.
In March 2025, the company opened its second Pharmacy Care Clinic in B.C., this time in Surrey. The opening event for the Surrey clinic was held with fanfare, and included a ribbon cutting attended by Shoppers Drug Mart dignitaries, politicians from City Hall and the provincial Minister of Health.
Shoppers Drug Mart former president Jeff Leger said plans for opening clinics in Surrey began after the company met with city Mayor Brenda Locke in summer 2024 to discuss health-care system pressures, and how a pharmacy clinic may be a potential solution.
“The Mayor, in her characteristic drive for progress, challenged us — instead of just one clinic, she encouraged us to think bigger, to aim for five clinics if we truly wanted to make a meaningful impact across the city,” Leger said.
“Shoppers Drug Mart will be opening seven clinics here in Surrey by the end of 2025 … Our sincere hope is that these seven locations will be able to relieve some of the pressures that have built up on emergency rooms and family physicians across the region.”
In a press release, Locke said, “I look forward to the positive impact these clinics will have on our residents. As we continue to grow and become the first city to reach one million people in British Columbia, health care needs are a priority.”
For Health Minister Josie Osborne, who was appointed to her current position in late 2024, the Surrey clinic opening was her first podium announcement inside a community pharmacy. She pointed to how health-care systems in B.C. are strained, and pharmacists are stepping in to help those without a primary care provider.
“The goal here is to improve access for all people to health care, and it has this incredibly valuable benefit, too, of alleviating some of the burden that we’re seeing on the emergency rooms in the primary care system here in B.C.,” Osborne said.
“I really look forward to learning more about how this new concept, this clinic, this place, is helping people in Surrey.”
In March 2025, Shoppers Drug Mart opened its second Pharmacy Care Clinic in British Columbia. This time, in Surrey. The opening was attended by dignitaries including the provincial Minister of Health and local elected officials.
So far, working in the Pharmacy Care Clinic has been rewarding for clinic staff such as Hutchinson, the Pharmacy Care Concierge in Kelowna. The opportunity represented a chance to do something new, and innovative.
Before she started her new role, she had practiced as a pharmacy assistant for 10 years. The role reminded her of the type of work medical office assistants would do in a physician’s clinic, and the company’s experience with clinics in other provinces meant that there were already training modules she could study to prepare for the new position.
“I like it because I’m a friendly person. I get to speak with customers and help them out with whatever they need. When I’m in the dispensary, I’m not really engaging with the public, which I can do in my new position,” Hutchinson said. “And people are so excited to hear about the clinic because there is nothing around here that is like this. When I tell them about all the services pharmacists can do, they’re so excited when they realize they don’t have to wait in walk-ins or emergency rooms for hours on end.”
A phrase that is used within the Shoppers Drug Mart company to describe Pharmacy Care Clinics is “the future of pharmacy”. While no one can predict with certainty, in many ways, the actions of various provincial governments and pharmacy groups across Canada suggest there is a strong belief in expanding the role of pharmacies in primary care. The Nova Scotia government government partnered with the Pharmacy Association of Nova Scotia (PANS) to launch a pilot program of Community Pharmacy Primary Care Clinics, located in areas with the highest number of people without a family doctor. The pilot was deemed a success with the CBC reporting a diversion of more than 10 per cent of patients from emergency departments and more than 25 per cent from walk-in clinics throughout the province. The program directly provided each pharmacy clinic $7,000 per month to help cover staffing costs, and later expanded its categories of clinical services that are eligible for public funding.
In April 2024, McKesson — at the time, the parent company of retail pharmacy Rexall — announced its first “Pharmacist Care Walk-In Clinic” in Barrie, Ontario, with treatment for minor illnesses, chronic disease management, immunizations and point-of-care tests among the services it offered. Rexall now advertises 11 such clinics in Ontario and six in Alberta.
Almost exactly a year later, Walmart did the same, announcing its first pharmacy clinic in St. Catherines, Ont., “with additional clinics opening later” in 2025, again offering among its services to treat minor ailments, conduct point-of-care testing, and offering medication management and support.
“I am actually really proud that our company, Shoppers Drug Mart, took that first initial step. Our company devised this concept knowing that this model is the future,” said Sumner, the Shoppers Drug Mart Associate Owner in Kelowna.
“The more people come in here, the more comfortable they are with what they’ve seen. They’ve experienced it and they want to come back. I tell people all the time, we are set up for the future, and one day, we will operate like a walk-in clinic.”