Q&A: Integrating Social Services Into Everyday Pharmacy Practice

Community pharmacies are uniquely positioned to address social factors that affect health, from food insecurity to housing instability. Embedding community health workers and building referral pathways helps connect patients with essential resources. With the right support, pharmacies can scale these services, improving outcomes and reinforcing their role in community health.

Q&A: Integrating Social Services Into Everyday Pharmacy Practice / Ivan - stock.adobe.com

Drug Topics® recently sat down with Christopher Daly, PharmD, MBA, BCACP, clinical associate professor at the University at Buffalo, and David Jacobs, PharmD, PhD, associate professor at the University at Buffalo, who were authors on a recent study that examined a community pharmacy health-related social needs model, to discuss the role community pharmacies play in identifying and addressing HRSN, and how pharmacies can integrate HRSN screening into their current workflow without disrupting daily operations.¹

Drug Topics: What role do you see community pharmacies playing in identifying and addressing health related social needs?

Christopher Daly, PharmD, MBA, BCACP: When we see the development of community pharmacies, especially in recent times, it's very important, now more than ever, that community pharmacies really do find themselves in the greater domain of public health. When we think about community pharmacies, we think about community fixtures where a patient can go to and receive a whole list of health care services—medications, advice and counseling, immunizations, vaccinations, all of those are very important. What we found out specifically through the COVID-19 pandemic is these community fixtures and community pharmacies received so many more asks for services. When we can think about other ways that community pharmacies are helping patients, this just hasn't been going on as recently as the pandemic, but really has been going on for many decades. Trying to link other services, whether it's community based organizations or other community fixtures, to patients, has really been at the forefront of community pharmacy for some time.

Our work is an attempt to formalize and grow this model where community pharmacy could be recognized as that point of continuity in some sort of referral system where they can connect a patient to a community based organization, like a food pantry or other support services within a local community. That is really where we're looking to highlight the work and not only identify it, but grow it through many different mechanisms.

David Jacobs, PharmD, PhD: I think community pharmacies could play a major role in identifying, as well as referring and navigating to, community based organizations. We've seen that in some of our previous work, and we have definitely seen that in our current paper that we just published. They're really in the center of their communities. There's access to them, there's really novelty around the pharmacy space and what they could do in this area. It's starting to grow, not just from the work we just published, but ability at community pharmacies across the country. This does, at least, I feel, represent an opportunity for pharmacy to play a major role, not just on the clinical care but also on the social care that sometimes is needed for these patients to overcome barriers.

Drug Topics: How can pharmacies integrate health-related social needs screening into their current workflow without disrupting daily operations?

Jacobs: We've been trying to work around this for a while. I think one of the major feedback that we get when we're trying to integrate new services into pharmacies is how to put it into workflow. A lot of it has to come to leadership and training, giving the pharmacies, the pharmacy technicians and the pharmacy staff time and the opportunity to integrate these new services into their operations. If you give them the right resources, we've really seen success within the pharmacies to get them involved, to get them working on these new services. We've also had some feedback from the pharmacy staff themselves that when given time and the opportunity and resources, including training, this provides them chances to integrate the screening into their workflow, as well as optimize the time that they're spending with patients in order to improve their care and outcomes downstream.

Daly: It is a mindset within pharmacy. I will fully acknowledge that community pharmacy is very resource stretched in that a lot of time and pressure and stress is on the model currently, especially with all of the national closures that we're facing in all settings. But when we look at the individual pharmacies that we get to work with, it really starts with a mindset, and we term that mindset practice transformation. They see themselves in those next steps, and they're willing to put together, either through training or integrating new workflow, the steps necessarily to transform their model to be more receptive, either alongside daily operations or in some sort of appointment based model. A national movement termed the Community Pharmacy Enhanced Services Network does bring together the clinical integration of these pharmacies. That's one of our major partners over a multitude of projects. Being able to do that, having these pharmacies receptive to this type of work, from a grantsmanship point of view, is ideal, because then we're able to provide resources to lower the initial barriers of entry into getting any of these new services. And as Dr. Jacobs has mentioned, that's going to be initial resources—time and money—that we're able to provide in that little bit is the stimulus needed to grow these programs within these local communities, which is the important factor here.

READ MORE: Public Health Resource Center

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