Living Room Pharmacy is doing its bit to help those with a little less.
The Courtenay business donates medications to the Dawn to Dawn CARE-A-VAN Program, a mobile health care unit that supports homeless and at-risk individuals in the Comox Valley.
Pharmacy owners Jane Wareing and Greg Oksanen were approached by their friend Helen Boyd, the CARE-A-VAN co-ordinator who asked the couple for their assistance.
"She has the biggest heart in the world," Oksanen said of Boyd, the Professional Merit Award recipient at the 2010 Comox Valley Chamber of Commerce Annual Community Awards.
Together with Boyd and several physicians, the couple came up with a sustainable formula for non-prescription medications designed to make people comfortable. The medications can be used to treat afflictions such as nausea, dehydration or itchiness, as opposed to diabetes or high blood pressure.
"We looked at basically some simple products or medications that would treat conditions that could be quite threatening in a homeless population," Oksanen said. "It's really not that big of a deal."
That said, pain killers, anti-inflammatories and even multi-vitamins can make a big difference in the well-being of homeless individuals.
"When they go through them we just replenish them, and we've been doing that as long as the CARE-A-VAN's been running," Oksanen said. "That part of it has gone absolutely swimmingly. It's been a real success.
"Coming up with that formulary and deciding what was essential to treat in people was the key...What the CARE-A-VAN is really working at is offering that ounce of prevention as opposed to a pound of cure. If you get these things early enough and prevent them from happening, it's immense the grief it saves the public and the person."
The only other mobile health care units Oksanen is aware of operate in Toronto and Portland.
reporter@comoxvalleyrecord.com