Q&A: Equity in Pharmacy Means Meeting Patients Where They Are

Equity in pharmacy care goes beyond offering identical services and means tailoring support to each patient’s needs. Pharmacists build trust through long-term relationships, allowing them to adjust counseling and communication styles. By addressing health literacy and ensuring patients understand their care, pharmacists turn equity into practice at both individual and systemic levels.

Q&A: Equity in Pharmacy Means Meeting Patients Where They Are / Gorodenkoff - stock.adobe.com

Drug Topics® recently sat down with Amy Howard, MS, PharmD, clinical assistant professor at the University of Maryland, and Laura Sahm, PhD, professor of clinical pharmacy at University College Cork, to discuss the role health literacy plays in advancing health equity and how pharmacists can contribute meaningfully to that goal.

Drug Topics: What role does health literacy play in advancing health equity, and how can pharmacists contribute meaningfully to that goal?

Laura Sahm, PhD: When I think of equity, I think of that very powerful image of a bicycle for everybody, and it's the same bicycle for everybody. That's maybe equal, but it's not equitable. What I would tell my students is that as you get to know your patients as a community pharmacist, you are going to develop a really trusting and long lasting relationship with people over the years. The important thing is that once you have this relationship, you can assess how much time that somebody will need. Saying that you're going to spend 10 minutes with every patient that comes into your pharmacy is, first of all, probably unrealistic, and second of all, maybe not necessary.

If you have taken the time to invest in your relationships with your patients, you're probably more primed to pick up on things, and you will notice the cues … When you realize that there may be somebody who is struggling with something, they might take 20 minutes of your time, but that's equitable, because that is responding to where they are on their health literacy and their medication management journey. That's the key—it's to recognize how we can focus and how we can be tailored in our approach to each individual patient, rather than applying a standardized method tool.

Amy Howard, MS, PharmD: The International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP) is having its annual World Congress, and as part of that, the health and medicines Information section that I'm part of, we decided that my focus as an executive is on health literacy. We decided that we were going to do this full one day summit, happening in advance of the Congress … Our focus there was really thinking about as we launch into a global stage right, there are entities like the World Health Organization that are forming consortiums on health literacy. How do we have a seat at the table and have be part of those conversations in shaping how health literacy will integrate across all health care delivery. For me, a lot of the conversations that happen in FIP are linkages between self-care and providing greater access. We know in definition in health literacy, the first verb that we always talk about is access, whether or not that's physical or navigational in the space, but so much of even putting information at a level where someone can access it then allows them to grow their health literacy and to navigate and have the level of autonomy and like self-fulfillment and the ability to care for their own wellness and manage their conditions. In doing that, we're creating health equity.

If we think about it from an organizational standpoint, then we've got the mirror that we can hold up to the organizations that are responsible for these care delivery mechanisms and start to demand even as an individual pharmacist, I can say to my organization, we need to do something to address this, because certainly I can tailor all of my individualized things which we should be doing to meet my patient where they are. But if we start to look at a systems level, it allows us to say again, Baltimore, if we know that 40% of the patient population is reading at or below fourth grade level, then we need to structurally build upstream type of mechanisms that allow us to save time, so that we're not constantly behind the scenes. But to save time and how we're doing this to fundamentally shift how we're approaching our patient populations so that we can provide equitable care. A lot of times, FIP is linking all these routes towards universal health care that we're trying to advocate for at a global level. The amount of ways that we're able to provide greater access, whether or not that's informational access or physical access, is really important.

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