Chester ice cream and coffee cafe opens Saturday Springfield Med gets pharmacist consult grant

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Visitors to this Saturday’s Fall Festival will find a new business open on the Chester Green.

The Main Street Coffee and Scoop Shoppe – the latest creation of Scott and Leslie Blair, owners of the Southern Pie Company, just down the street – will be opening that day.

Located in the former Mountain Leather Shop building, next to The Free Range Restaurant, the new cafe will serve coffees, homemade ice cream, milkshakes and savory as well as sweet baked goods including a pie slice of the week.

The Southern Pie Company – at the west end of the Green – will continue to serve pie slices, quiche, sandwiches and other goodies and sell whole pies.

According to Scott Blair, while the shop’s espresso machine hasn’t arrived yet, the WiFi will be working, there will be comfortable places to sit and he intends to be open from early morning for the breakfast traffic until 8 p.m. for the after dinner crowd.

SMCS gets grant for pharmacist consultation service

Coverys Community Healthcare Foundation, of Boston, Mass., recently awarded a $25,000 grant to Springfield Medical Care Systems. The grant supports an innovative new concept to include pharmacist consultation services as a component of its Rapid Access Clinic.

The pharmacist consult program was initially launched in 2017, and this grant will allow SMCS to offer expanded hours at Rockingham and Springfield locations.

The Rapid Access Clinic provides expedited psychiatric access for SMCS patients upon discharge from a medical, psychiatric or substance abuse hospital admission, and on an urgent ‘as needed’ basis for previously established SMCS primary care patients. The mission of the RAC is to provide brief consultation for acute psychiatric patients to increase timely connection with needed services.

The objective to embed a licensed pharmacist to work side-by-side with a nurse practitioner in the Rapid Access Clinic was to reduce medication use whenever possible, and to improve medication reconciliation and monitor drug safety and efficacy. These efforts have proven successful. The clinic, currently serving nearly 100 patients, discovered 64 percent of participants had medication discrepancies requiring intervention.

“Overall patient medication list accuracy is greatly improved through implementation of this new program,” comments Ji Chen, Director of Pharmacy Services at Springfield Hospital. She continues, “Throughout the process, the pharmacist is readily available as a valuable resource for counseling on potential side effects, drug interactions, and to improve medication adherence. The result is prevention of serious medication errors and improved health and wellness for patients.”