PORT HAWKESBURY - It started as a proposal for his university courses, but a local pharmacist's concept of a mobile vaccination clinic for COVID-19 has now overseen hundreds of jabs in local arms since it first set up shop this spring.

Michael Hatt, the owner-operator of Port Hawkesbury's Medicine Shoppe franchise on Reeves Street, began welcoming Strait Area residents to the former ambulance parked outside of his business on March 29. According to Hatt, the seeds of the mobile-clinic concept were originally planted in 2019, when he spotted an advertisement on the Kijiji Web site that was offering a gently-used ambulance for sale. 

While he didn't see the vehicle as more than a potential delivery option for his business at that point, Hatt remembered the Kijiji ad when he started kicking around the concept of a mobile vaccination clinic for a class project that was part of his training for a Doctorate of Pharmacy degree at Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN).

"They were asking for something new that a pharmacy could partake in, and they asked us to come up with ten new ideas," Hatt recalled. "Five of them ended up being about how a mobile service could deliver vaccines, and that's how I came up with the idea."

Inspired, Hatt found the original ambulance seller, made a purchase, and tested out the mobile-vaccination concept last fall as he administered flu shots to people around the Strait Area, with the hopes of continuing the process once COVID-19 vaccinations became available.

Today, with thousands of people now having received their doses of Pfizer or Moderna from a format that has recently expanded to include drive-thru options, Hatt is pleased to be able to contribute a new service to an area that often struggles with being able to attract and retain full-time physicians. 

"I often use Louisdale as an example of a community that has a fairly good-sized population, but no pharmacy," Hatt noted. "And then you look in the opposite direction, you have Judique, you have Auld's Cove and Mulgrave. We have a very wide population, but in a large service area...And I know that our population is aging, and that travel is difficult... So if there's something we can do to make things a little easier by going to a community and offering that service on their doorstep, it's hopefully making life a little easier for everybody."