Smilin’ Steves closes three Vermont pharmacies, including at Woodstock clinic – Valley News

WOODSTOCK — The pharmacy inside Ottauquechee Health Center on Pleasant Street is closed as of Friday, along with two other Vermont pharmacies owned by Smilin’ Steves Pharmacies.

The Vermont pharmacy chain announced in a Facebook post just after 2 p.m. Friday that the three locations would be permanently closed at the end of the day. Signs were also posted on the front doors of the stores in Woodstock, Springfield and Ludlow.

Smilin’ Steves’ Rutland pharmacy and High Mountain Home Care LTC Pharmacy, also in Rutland, will stay open.

The company urged customers to call the Rutland pharmacy at 802-775-2545 to transfer prescriptions to another pharmacy, access records or with any other questions.

“We apologize for the suddenness of this,” one of the companies’ owners, Jeff Hochberg, said in a Monday interview. “This was out of our control and we are trying to do everything we can to help correct the situation here and now and forever as long as we can.”

While the Facebook post from Smilin’ Steves Pharmacies references “unforeseen circumstances with our wholesaler,” Hochberg declined to provide specific details about the situation that he said arose last week. He described it as a “David-Goliath situation” and “where healthcare meets capitalism.”

“I really can’t speak too much to the circumstances other than that they were totally unforeseen. This was not planned and we did everything we could to try to rectify the situation as quickly as possible,” Hochberg said, adding that the situation is still unfolding and there may be “more to come.”

He also declined to explain why the Rutland pharmacy and home care pharmacy were able to continue operating.

The Ottauquechee Pharmacy opened inside the Dartmouth Health-run Ottauquechee Health Center in 2021 after the 167-year-old Woodstock Pharmacy closed its doors in 2020.

DH, which had no ownership or oversight of the pharmacy, learned about the closure on Friday, Keith Thomasset, the health network’s chief pharmacy officer, said in a Monday statement.

DH is “committed to ensuring our patients have access to the care they need, including medications,” and has started researching short-term and long-term solutions to address the pharmacy shortage in and around Woodstock, Thomasset said.

But “opening a new pharmacy is not a quick process,” he added.

Options might include “developing a proposed plan to assist with acute care needs while (continuing) to utilize other Dartmouth Health system pharmacy services, such as our own specialty pharmacy and home delivery pharmacy services,” or starting a new DH-owned pharmacy in the area, Thomasset said.

With the closure, Woodstock joins the growing list of Upper Valley towns without a pharmacy. Amid a bankruptcy case, Rite Aid closed all its locations last summer, leaving Windsor and Bethel without pharmacies.

Pharmacies around Vermont have closed over the last several years, often citing poor margins as a result of low reimbursement rates, according to reporting from VtDigger.

Woodstock residents will have to order prescriptions by mail or travel 25 minutes to pharmacies in Lebanon, including CVS, Hannaford, Price Chopper, Walmart and Walgreens or 35 minutes to Kinney Drugs in Randolph.

For its part, Springfield still has a Kinney Drugs location and the recently-opened North Star Health Pharmacy.

Hochberg encouraged Smilin’ Steves customers to contact the Rutland pharmacy with any questions, adding “the system is designed for situations like this” and customer data is still accessible.

As for the employees, Hochberg said the company reached out to other pharmacies to see if anyone was hiring immediately. He did not know exactly how many employees were impacted by the closures, but said it is more than 10.

When asked if there is any possibility of reopening the closed locations as the company works to resolve the situation, Hochberg said the “future is very uncertain.”

“There is definitely a possibility of something in the future, pharmacy is not going anywhere, it’s just got to change,” Hochberg said.