Leveraging Community Pharmacies to Address Social Needs: A Promising Practice to Improve Healthcare Quality

TL;DR

Community pharmacies can help address social needs like housing and food insecurity, improving healthcare quality for chronic conditions.

Contribution

The paper introduces community pharmacies as a promising infrastructure to address social determinants of health in under-resourced areas.

Findings

Community pharmacies are trusted and accessible in under-resourced neighborhoods.

Pharmacies can deliver individualized services addressing social needs alongside clinical care.

Case examples from California show how pharmacies can be part of healthcare quality improvement strategies.

Abstract

Emerging research suggests that chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and asthma are often mediated by adverse social conditions that complicate their management. These conditions include circumstances such as lack of affordable housing, food insecurity, barriers to safe and reliable transportation, structural racism, and unequal access to healthcare or higher education. Although health systems cannot independently solve these problems, their infrastructure, funding resources, and well-trained workforce can be realigned to better address social needs created by them. For example, community pharmacies and the professionals they employ can be utilized and are well-positioned to deliver balanced, individualized clinical services, with a focus on the whole person. Because they have deep roots and presence in the community, especially in under-resourced neighborhoods, community pharmacies (independent and chain) represent local entities that community members recognize and trust. In this article, we provide case examples from California, United States, to illustrate and explore how community pharmacies can be leveraged to address patient social needs as part of their core responsibilities and overall strategy to improve healthcare quality.