Lavin Is 2025 Community Health Service Award Recipient

Many in the banquet audience of the Dakota Hospital Foundation Community Leadership Dinner were likely thinking of their own moments with Lavin when he offered help and encouragement as a family member or they themselves were struggling with a health issue.

They couldn’t help but agree that the Foundation made the right choice when choosing Lavin to be the recipient of its 2025 Community Health Service Award.

Lavin is the owner and a pharmacist at Davis Pharmacy in Vermillion, which has been in business in the community since 1880. For years, his father, Tom, was also a fixture at the pharmacy. Matt Lavin served as the director of the pharmacy at Sanford Vermillion for 16 years. In 2016, he left the hospital and joined his father at Davis Pharmacy, becoming its fourth generation pharmacist/owner.

He received the honor near the conclusion of the Dakota Hospital Foundation’s Community Leadership Dinner. It’s an annual event that gives the Foundation a chance to award scholarships to local students pursuing education in various fields of health care, award Sanford Vermillion employees who come up with innovative ideas to improve the care provided at the local healthcare center and to present its Community Health Service Award.

The awards banquet was held Tuesday night, May 13, in the ballroom of the Muenster University Center on the University of South Dakota campus.

“Nominating Matt for this award was the easiest thing that I’ve done yet this year,” Mart said as she stood on the banquet stage to present Lavin with the award. “It was such a pleasure to consider all the ways that Matt is deserving of this honor.”

She said she has trusted Davis Pharmacy for all the medication needs of her family and herself since moving to Vermillion in 1997.

“I first knew and trusted Tom Lavin, Matt’s father, and then over the years, got to know Matt and began counting on him for medication advice for my children and myself,” she said. “Matt was always a tremendous resource as I made decisions about when to go see the doctor and when and how to just treat the symptoms.

“He was always helpful and friendly and was a favorite for my children when they were sick,” Mart said, “because they knew he would throw in a piece of candy as a treat to help the medicine go down.”

During those early years of becoming acquainted with Lavin, she said she never imagined the role that a pharmacist plays in the treatment of a terminal illness.

After her husband, Doug, was diagnosed with cancer in 2021, he underwent surgery, chemotherapy and radiation and often was in considerable pain during his three year battle with the disease.

“I believe that the advice and compassion that I received from Matt helped me help Doug continue to live and work and play during those years with cancer,” Mart said. “Matt was accessible to us on a daily basis. Literally, during Doug’s battle with cancer, he was personally familiar with Doug’s treatment plan, his doctors, his symptoms and with the quality of life that Doug wished to lead.

“I think that’s the key point. I think that his personal care of our people in the community … I think the advice that he was giving to Doug would be different than what he might have given to somebody else who was maybe not still trying to go fishing and boating and working and stuff,” she said. “So that was just out of this world.”

Mart said that Lavin’s knowledge and the advice that he provided “assisted me in helping Doug keep living his life to the fullest. I frequently would stop in Matt’s office to ask questions about medications or about his treatments or symptoms. Matt offered suggestions that I would then bring to Doug’s oncologist and as a result, sometimes the treatments or medications were tweaked to make them more helpful to Doug.”

She added that he also provided care for her when she needed it the most.

“At my lowest points, Matt would usher me into his office and he would listen, let me cry, provide explanations and offer me those really good caramels that they have at the front of the store to help me keep navigating Doug through this healthcare crisis,” Mart said. “I’m thankful for all the healthcare providers at Sanford who compassionately cared for Doug through those three years: the oncologists and nurses, radiology and lab technicians, physical therapists, receptionists, all of them.

“But I honestly would not have been able to have successfully navigated Doug through all those treatments without the expertise and personalized compassion of Matt Lavin at Davis Pharmacy,” she said. “I cannot imagine a person more deserving of an award meant to honor a person who contributes to the good health of the entire Vermillion community.”

“It’s an honor to receive this kind of recognition,” Lavin said after Mart presented him with the award. He reflected on the reasons he chose to return to Vermillion after working as a pharmacist in Appleton, Minnesota, Hawarden, Iowa and Sioux Falls.

“I love my community. I’m proud to be part of this community. I spent my entire life in a drugstore, so it was kind of like, ‘what else am I going to do?’” he said.

Cindy Benzel, the director of the Dakota Hospital Foundation, stopped by the pharmacy recently to tell Lavin that he was the recipient of the award.

“Honestly, this was the absolute last thing I thought she was coming to talk to me about,” Lavin said, “When she left, I was thinking that I haven’t been doing this long enough. I think of the people who have received this award before me and they’ve done all of these things and they were in Vermillion for a long time.

“And then I start thinking, ‘I’ve been doing this longer than I think I have,’” he said, prompting laughs from the banquet audience.

Lavin said he also began thinking of the times he would accompany his parents to Davis Pharmacy.

“As a kid, it was probably Mom throwing one of us with him (their dad, Tom) just to get one of the five out of the house,” he said, “but I remember going to the drug store very often, during evenings and weekends and holidays and it was just a way to get out and dad was always doing that.

“But it wasn’t just dad. I grew up in the hospital as well,” Lavin said, noting that the unique features of the drug store were the candy and comic books that were part of its inventory and the old elevator at the hospital made it a special place.

“I grew up in an environment where helping people was all I knew,” he said. “It was what I saw my parents doing. That’s what I heard customers and people in the community telling me that my grandfather and great grandfather did and that’s all I wanted to do.”

Lavin said he has four great siblings and joked that he is thankful that they all chose different careers.

“I got to come home,” he said, “and it’s what I always wanted to do.”

Lavin graduated from Vermillion High School in 1990 and spent the next two years attending the University of South Dakota completing his pre-pharmacy requirements. Although he was accepted into the dental program at the University of Nebraska, he chose the pharmacy program at South Dakota State University in Brookings in the fall of 1992.

His relationships with the faculty at SDSU were surprisingly like many of those Matt had while growing up in Vermillion, according to a brief biography of Lavin included in Tuesday’s banquet program. When introduced to the Dean of the Pharmacy School on the first day of class, he was greeted with what had become a familiar phrase, “I taught your parents.”

Lavin graduated in the spring of 1996, a member of the last class to receive a bachelor’s degree in pharmacy as all subsequent classes at SDSU would receive their PharmD degrees.

He first worked for The Liebe Drug managing a store in Appleton, Minnesota. Lavin remembers that many of his classmates and friends were heading South for jobs as there were very few opportunities in South Dakota for pharmacists at that time.

He spent a year working at Booth Drug in Hawarden, Iowa, before moving to Sioux Falls to manage Lewis Westgate. Happy to be back in South Dakota, Lavin met his wife Carol, who was a hospice nurse for Sanford.

In the fall of 2000, there was an opportunity for the couple to move to Vermillion, as Sanford Vermillion (then Sioux Valley) was looking for a pharmacy director and a hospice director. His wife, Carol, filled the hospice position.

For the next 16 years, Lavin was the director of pharmacy at the hospital. He also helped at the drug store evenings and weekends. He was named SDSU’s College Preceptor of the Year, overseeing over 100 students over the years in their rotations at the hospital and retail.

It was a unique time in which Lavin worked with both his parents. His mother, Sandy, worked at the hospital pharmacy as one of the pharmacists and his father, Tom, was still running the drug store at this time.

During his years at Sanford, he served seven years on the Vermillion School Board while chasing two busy children, Madisen and Hunter.

In 2016, Lavin left the hospital and joined his father at Davis Pharmacy, becoming the fourth-generation pharmacist/owner.