The community of Bourke is home to Australia's top pharmacist after Peter Crothers took out the title at the Pharmaceutical Society of Australia's excellence awards in Sydney.
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Mr Crothers owns the Towers Drug Company in Bourke and was recognised for the passion and resilience he has displayed throughout his career.
With the bigger profile his award win brings, Mr Crothers said he hopes to raise awareness of problems in the health system and advocate for better healthcare services in smaller communities.
"We really are in a lot of trouble in these small one-pharmacy and one-doctor towns," he said.
"There's a very real possibility of smaller communities permanently losing all of their health services. [That means] no general practitioner (GP), no pharmacist, no hospital. And that's just devastating."
Mr Crothers said he knew of many pharmacists struggling to keep the doors to their businesses open in smaller communities.
He said small towns needed a hospital, GP and pharmacy to keep residents healthy.
"Those three things support each other.... without any one of them, the whole health system falls apart and we've seen that happen," he said.
"It's all very well to be a bureaucrat sitting in your ivory tower wherever you are, making decisions about allocation of resources... but what I think is often lost is that when people say 'oh well we can pull a bit away from there' well that just might be the critical bit that causes the whole system to fall over.
"That might be enough for the local GP to say 'that's it, I've had enough, I'm out of here' or the local pharmacist to say 'I can't service my loan anymore that I've got to pay for the pharmacy, I'm going to go bankrupt' and those sorts of things are just devastating for communities."
Mr Crothers credited communities like Bourke for coping and overcoming challenges that weren't only healthcare related.
"In communities like this, all the really good things that happen are happening because the community itself has mobilised," he said.
"In Bourke it doesn't matter if it's Justice Reinvestment or the work that we're doing in the domestic violence space or the beaut exhibition centre we've got out here... all of these things come from within the community and all of the really bad things that happen to us are imposed on us from the outside."
Small communities should be listened to and supported, he said.
"People take away our commercial air service and they downgrade our hospital and those sorts of things... that's really damaging to the community but we don't get any say in that," Mr Crothers said.
"Those are decisions that are made elsewhere."
Mr Crothers said he hoped to bring a constructive and solutions-focused approach to solving problems affecting small communities.
"When you get an award like this it probably makes people slightly more inclined to listen and if that happens it'll be a good thing," he said.
Mr Crothers dedicated the award to other pharmacists like him in remote and rural communities.
"There are probably about 300 people who do what I do, but they're not necessarily as visible as me," he said.
