What we are doing

ROAM is a research program led by Dr. Kaitlyn Watson at the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Pharmacy & Pharmaceutical Sciences with an interdisciplinary research team across the university and with collaborating interest-holders across the health system, government, private, public, and not-for-profit sectors.

We are co-designing a mobile pharmacy model with rural communities built from the ground up to serve Alberta’s diverse and dispersed populations. The steps we are taking include:

• Understanding current pharmacy use and access in rural communities in Alberta
• Modelling to identify communities that could potentially benefit from ROAM
• Engaging communities to better understand their needs and perspectives on ROAM 
• Co-designing ROAM (e.g., operations, services, schedule, staffing, revenue-sharing etc.) with interest-holders
• Building ROAM, the first Canadian mobile pharmacy van
• Piloting ROAM within Northern Alberta
• Creating additional ROAM vehicles and expanding to Central and Southern Alberta.

How We Work

ROAM is community-first. We don’t arrive with ready-made answers. We listen, co-design, and build alongside the communities we serve. Indigenous data sovereignty and cultural safety principles guide everything we do. Findings go back to communities before they go to academic journals. We apply Systems Thinking principles, starting from a shared question,

“what does it take for a person in a rural Alberta community to receive uninterrupted pharmacy care? And how does this change during a wildfire?”

This question cannot be answered within any single discipline’s vocabulary. Our transdisciplinary model includes collaboration across the academic, public, and private sectors. It is happening at the exact right time with interest and commitment across sectors and disciplines.