Iolan’s career maintains family tradition

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October 21, 2015 - 12:00 AM

Iolans worried that the town is forever losing its talented young people to the enticements of larger cities can find comfort in the example of Morgan Dieker.
The 24-year-old University of Kansas graduate, and native Iolan, recently joined the staff at Iola Pharmacy after completing her professional licensing last summer.
Dieker, whose father Jeff is a pharmacist and part owner of the downtown store, spent her school-age years imbibing the neighborly air of the small-town pharmacy. “Everyone teases that I’ve worked here since I was 5, because I used to come in on the weekends with [my dad] and run the register with the older girls, and just hang out. I was always here.”
The profession, though, didn’t have an automatic claim on the Iola High School grad. As a kid, Dieker watched as her dad was routinely called away from home for long hours behind the counter. “Being young, I didn’t really understand why he did that and had to be away from us.
“But then when I was a sophomore in high school and became an official employee here, as a clerk, I finally got to see the rewards he got out of it. Not the money; the relationships with the customers and the kind of joy that you can bring to those relationships.”
Today, Dieker lists her dad as her best mentor, and on any given day you can find the two working side by side behind the tall counter.
And so it was in high school that Dieker’s clarity of purpose turned absolute. She graduated from IHS with a swarm of dual college credits and kept that pace through her six years of study in Lawrence (the school of pharmacy requires two years of undergraduate work prior to the four years of professional training). (No slouch, Dieker collected a minor in business to boot.)
Having avoided the lure of Mass Street during her early twenties — “I wasn’t in a sorority, so the whole bar scene just really wasn’t me; I was busy, I was studying.” — Dieker spent her final year at KU accumulating work experience through a career-training program intended to expose upcoming grads to the widest variety of professional tracks within their chosen field.
Dieker logged weeks-long stints at independent pharmacies in Garnett and Chanute; she worked for a month in the pharmacy at a Price Chopper in Olathe; two months at Stormont-Vail hospital in Topeka; and two months at the KU Medical Center.
An incalculable benefit of the nine-month program, said Dieker, was the prolonged interaction she was afforded with both patients and doctors, and the practice she gained learning to communicate with both groups.
Pharmacists — who, behind their storefront windows, are generally more accessible than doctors — offer a semantic bridge between the medical jargon of the provider and the workaday vocabulary of sickness and health that marks the inquiries of the average customer.
“And that is really so important,” stressed Dieker, “being able to translate the information from the doctor. We talk to doctors multiple times every day. And patients obviously use us a lot. They can just pick up the phone and give us a call and get an answer really quick.
“Our slogan here is, ‘Our customers are like family,’” and that is really true. They trust what we have to say. Either they come in or sometimes they pick up the phone. There are a lot of elderly in the community who are lonely … and will call multiple times and just want someone to talk to. That’s what’s rewarding.”
Dieker’s return to Iola Pharmacy is worth more than just a burst of positive morale. In her short tenure at the store, she’s already helped introduce a handful of substantive improvements into the operations of the nearly half-century old business.
For one, Iola Pharmacy has just upgraded its computerized records system to a version recommended by Dieker. “There are a lot of new features that I hope our patients are going to like. For example, we’re now able to sync patients’ medications. So they only have to come in, say, once a month instead of every week. And little things, like we can now send you a text message when medications are ready.”
The pharmacy is also on the brink of a major renovation, beginning with the building’s exterior. “We’re going to add a couple of rooms, too, because I’m licensed to do immunizations here in the store — flu shots, shingles vaccines, things like that.”
Occasionally, a customer at the Madison Avenue store will recognize Dieker from the days when she used to hang around the pharmacy after school.  “It’s been funny, coming back and being so young. People call all the time and say ‘Hey, I need to talk to a pharmacist.’ And I have to go, ‘Yeah, that’s me.’ They have to take a second and go, ‘Oh, OK.’ That’s probably been the biggest transition for me.
“One of the first weeks that I worked here, they called down for a pharmacist. So I went down and the guy says, ‘Whoa, you’re really young.’ I said, ‘I am. I know. But I’m here to help you.’”

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