The wait is almost over. By this time next year Mill City and the Santiam Canyon should have a pharmacy to serve the region.
No more traveling down Highway 22 to Salem or Stayton for prescriptions.
Santiam Hospital & Clinics announced Sept. 16, that it is planning to build a pharmacy that will be co-located with its current Santiam Medical Clinic on South First Avenue in Mill City.
The hospital already has raised $575,000 for the project and needs $175,000 more. Aron Beugli, pharmacy director for Santiam Hospital & Clinics, said they hope to break ground in the next couple of months and open by late spring in 2026.
“We’re so excited to have a pharmacy back in the Santiam Canyon,” Maggie Hudson, president and CEO of the hospital, said at an event in Mill City announcing the plan. “There is such strong need here.”
Mill City – and the entire Santiam Canyon – has been without a pharmacy since January of 2020, when Randy Mickey and his wife Kathy closed their shop on Southwest Broadway.
Mickey was on hand for the announcement and said “this is a win-win for the town of Mill City and the Santiam Canyon. We can’t get it in here any too soon.”
Beugli said that the facility will have one entrance for the clinic and a separate one for the pharmacy.
The site is not large enough to allow for a drive-through window, and Hudson and Beugli also noted that there are parking challenges still to be resolved.
The pharmacy will be open Monday through Friday. Hours haven’t been established, Beugli said. Staffing the facility is still a work in progress.
With regard to the hours and the schedule, Hudson said that the goal is to “start somewhere and figure out the demand.”
The announcement took place on a warm Tuesday afternoon in a tent on the riverside property of Frances McGuire, whose family played a key role in Santiam Canyon health care throughout the 20th Century. McGuire told a series of stories about medicine in the Canyon, with no Highway 22, scads of serious logging injuries and clinics that were so tied to emergency work that no appointments were accepted. Her father and grandfather both practiced medicine in Mill City. Her job, McGuire said, was to file the needles and get them ready for the next shot.
And even here in the 21st Century those speaking at the announcement event noted health care challenges that still plague Canyon residents.
Jessica Grim, a nurse practitioner at Santiam Medical Clinic, talked of patients who were saddled with the problem of finding enough time or gas or money to get to the clinic for treatment and then to drive into Stayton, or perhaps Salem, for a prescription and then drive back up to Detroit or Idanha. The result was often that the patient was not able to get the prescription until a couple of days later, Grim said.
“Access here is incredibly important,” she said., “A pharmacy in Mill City will change that.”
