A year before employees at two downtown Edmonton mental health clinics were pressured into transferring their patients’ prescriptions to Shoppers Drug Mart, Alberta Health Services (AHS) signed a contract to embed Shoppers within a northeast Edmonton addictions recovery facility, according to documents obtained through FOIP. 

A former employee of Henwood Treatment Centre told the Progress Report that the presence of an on-site pharmacy created pressure to accept more in-patients than before, compromising their quality of care, and redundantly fill patients’ prescriptions that they had brought with them before entering treatment. 

The opening of Henwood’s on-site Shoppers points to a broader trend of private interests encroaching on the public health-care system in Alberta, which is being actively encouraged by the UCP government. 

Chris Gallaway, executive director of the public health-care advocacy group Friends of Medicare, says he’s concerned that the government has “given public infrastructure access” to a private company that aims “to profit off of mental health services.”

“If they were finding they needed more prescription and pharmacy services, they could hire someone or find a way to bring it in through Alberta Health Services,” Gallaway told the Progress Report. 

“There seems to be no clear need for this to be set up, and also in the end it doesn't look like it was a very good business model either.” 

Shoppers Drug Mart president Jeff Leger stands alongside Premier Danielle Smith as he announces $77-million over 10 years to increase the number of pharmacist-led clinics in Alberta. (Credit: Alberta Newsroom/Flickr)

Last year, the Report revealed that managers at the 108th Street Mental Health Services clinic and nearby Forensic Assessment and Community Services (FACS) clinic attached transfer consent forms to each prescription box, with the expectation that mental health workers would ask their patients to fill them out to have patients’ prescriptions filled at Shoppers.

A memo from management at the 108th Street clinic informed employees that Shoppers had been “contracted by AHS as the primary pharmacy services provider” for their clinics, but nobody at these clinics had seen any contracts.

In December, the Report filed a FOIP request with AHS for all the contracts it signed with Shoppers or its parent company Loblaw from 2020 to 2024.

The contracts revealed that Shoppers’ arrangement to supply FACS expires on June 30, 2028, and its deal to supply the 108th Street clinic ends on June 30, 2025, unless it was renewed after the FOIP request was submitted.

In addition to a contract for Covid testing worth $42 per test, the FOIP package included contracts for the Henwood pharmacy and the AHS opioid dependency program (ODP). 

The Henwood contract was signed in June 2020 with franchisee Jason Croteau Walker, a pharmacist whose JCW Pharmacy Ltd. was incorporated in February of that year, permitting him to open a Shoppers pharmacy at the Henwood facility. According to the former Henwood employee who spoke to the Report, however, the pharmacy opened at least a year earlier. 

The contract also gave JCW Pharmacy the right to operate the ODP at the AHS Churchill Square addictions and mental health clinic from June to July 2020.

During that month, the ODP program would be managed by William Colter Young, a pharmacist whose Shoppers franchise WCY Health Ltd. received the contracts to fill prescriptions for the 108th Street and FACS clinics. 

In April 2021, WCY Health Ltd. signed a contract to operate the ODP full-time, which cited the contractor’s “demonstrated experience and capability.”

‘It just makes my blood boil’

Bailey, who previously worked at Henwood for a decade, is being referred to pseudonymously to protect them from professional repercussions. 

The Shoppers location took up scarce space at the treatment centre, Bailey noted, reducing the amenities available to patients. 

In order to make space for the pharmacy, the nursing station was cramped into a room used for group and music therapy, and the pharmacy took the place of the old nursing station. 

This, Bailey said, reflected a mentality of, “Don't care if it fits, shoehorn it in there and let the staff figure out their space issues after the fact.”

“It just makes my blood boil,” they added. 

Since Henwood is a three-week residential treatment program, Bailey explained, patients are asked to bring a month’s supply of their medication, which is placed in lock-up and dispensed by nurses as prescribed. 

If a psychiatrist needed to prescribe patients additional medications, they were previously ordered from the nearby Medicine Shoppe, which would deliver them to Henwood. 

Once the Shoppers opened, however, patients were forced to fill their prescriptions at the on-site pharmacy, including their medications that had been placed in lock-up. 

“Why would you fill a prescription that the client already has in their hand? That's absurd,” said Bailey, who speculated that this was being done because the business couldn’t be sustained solely by the purchase of medications that were prescribed on-site.

In 2023, AHS conducted an on-site accreditation assessment of six addiction recovery facilities across the province, including Henwood. 

The inspection report noted that Henwood had recently undergone a “quality improvement initiative to enhance the medication reconciliation process,” which it attributed to the deeper integration of Shoppers pharmacists into the recovery program. 

“The pharmacists are now directly involved with all aspects of the medication reconciliation process at admission, transfer, and discharge; thereby increasing capacity for the nursing team to focus on nursing related duties,” the report reads.

In another move that Bailey speculated was motivated by the Shoppers franchise’s financial considerations, Henwood began accepting more patients with severe mental health issues, including bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, for concurrent mental health and addictions treatment. 

“Typically, when you have people coming into an addictions and mental health facility, you want them to be physically and mentally stable so that they can learn and understand what it's like to live without substances or alcohol,” Bailey explained. 

“They have to be stable in order to get full benefit from the treatment program.”

AHS’s description of the Henwood facility on its website emphasizes: “Clients must be medically and psychiatrically stable prior to start of treatment.”

After the Shoppers opened, Bailey said, the number of patients who could be categorized as severely mentally ill “skyrocketed,” doubling if not tripling. 

With a psychiatrist on staff only a few hours a week and six or seven patients sharing a room at the facility, a patient going through an “active psychosis” will have a major impact on their roommates’ treatment.

“People can't sleep at night because they're afraid of the person who has psychosis,” said Bailey. “If that person is not forthcoming with their psychosis, they don't get medicated for it, then you've got people who are fearful.” 

The Progress Report sent an email to AHS outlining Bailey’s allegations, which was forwarded to Recovery Alberta. 

“Changes were made to the unit at Henwood,” confirmed Recovery Alberta spokesperson Jessica Conlin. “The nursing station was moved to enhance isolation measures during the pandemic.”

She added that it’s common practice for the government to partner “with community pharmacies such as Shoppers Drug Mart to provide pharmacy services at a variety of community sites throughout the province.”

“Clients maintain the right to choose any community pharmacy for their medications,” wrote Conlin. 

She said that Henwood’s eligibility criteria hasn’t changed from what’s written on the AHS website.

Shoppers lobbying pays off

As previously reported by this outlet, beginning in December 2019, Shoppers hired Wellington Advocacy, a lobbying firm founded by then-premier Jason Kenney’s former campaign manager Nick Koolsbergen, to lobby the Premier’s Office and Alberta Health “on how to best improve prescription medication access in Alberta.”

That lobbying continues to this day, and last month was expanded to include the four entities that AHS is in the process of being split into—Mental Health and Addictions, Assisted Living and Social Services, Hospital and Surgical Health Services, and Primary and Preventative Health Services. 

Gallaway noted that it’s not just addictions and mental health where Shoppers is making profit off of public health-care. The company is also setting up shop in primary care and assisted living. 

In January 2024, Premier Danielle Smith stood alongside Shoppers president Jeff Leger as Leger announced a $77-million investment over four years to operate 103 “pharmacy care clinics” across the province by the end of the year, which he promised would “backstop the provincial health-care system.”

These clinics enable pharmacists to treat patients for minor and common ailments, including pink eye, cold sores, strep throat, and urinary tract infections. While you’re there, Shoppers employees might try to sell you on some private lab testing, for which you’ll have to pay out of pocket.

Calgary-based Toronto Star columnist Gillian Steward called Smith’s appearance with Leger “nothing more than a government-sponsored advertisement for Shoppers.”

In October 2020, Shoppers subsidiary MediSystems announced the opening of a centralized Edmonton pharmacy specializing in drugs for seniors in the city’s dozens of continuing care facilities, which Gallaway characterized as a “disaster.” 

The Alberta government, in partnership with Shoppers, appears to be “testing different ways to either fully privatize services and facilities or find ways to allow private operators to make a profit,” said Gallaway. 

This piece originally stated that the Shoppers Drug Mart at Henwood Treatment Centre has closed. In fact, it remains open.