First There Were Food Deserts

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www.verywellhealth.com/pharmacy-deserts-impact-access-to-key-services-5184549

One-Third of Neighborhoods in Major U.S. Cities Are Pharmacy Deserts
By Claire Bugos 05/13/2021

Key Takeaways

People living in predominantly Black and Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods are less likely to live near a pharmacy.
Not all pharmacies offer key services like on-hand medications for certain ailments or COVID-19 vaccination.
In many of these neighborhoods, pharmacies shut down at higher rates or open new locations at lower ones.

In some cities, it may seem as if there is a pharmacy on nearly every corner. But residents in one-third of neighborhoods in major U.S. cities experience difficulty accessing pharmacies, according to a new study.

These so-called “pharmacy deserts” exist predominantly in Black and Hispanic/Latino neighborhoods, compared with White or diverse neighborhoods.

In a study published last week in the journal Health Affairs, researchers write that inequitable access to pharmacy services could have important consequences for racial and ethnic disparities in prescription medication adherence, use of essential health care services, and even COVID-19 vaccination rates.1
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“The key point with this research is that segregation does impact health, and this is just another way that it does,” senior study author Dima Qato, PharmD, MPH, PhD, associate professor at the USC School of Pharmacy, tells Verywell. “Pharmacies are not exempt from this problem and we need to take care and pay attention to that if we want to really reduce disparities in medication adherence.”

The researchers studied data from the 30 most populous U.S. cities between 2007 and 2015. There were varying degrees of disparity in these cities, with the most pronounced inequities in:

Chicago
Los Angeles
Baltimore
Philadelphia
Milwaukee
Dallas
Boston
Albuquerque

In Chicago, for instance, about a third of Black neighborhoods lacked accessible pharmacies, compared with 1% of predominantly White neighborhoods in the city. The study is likely the first to examine pharmacy accessibility across the U.S. by racial or ethnic make-up of cities.

“I think the goal there was to demonstrate that it's a problem that's affecting all minority communities across the board in urban areas,” Qato says.

High Pharmacy Closure Rates

The researchers defined the most populous cities as those with a population of 500,000 or more between 2007 and 2015. They studied more than 10,000 neighborhoods comprising a total of 42 million residents. More than three-quarters of these neighborhoods were segregated by race or ethnicity.
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Though pharmacies are more common in urban spaces compared to rural areas, they are also more likely to shut down and are less likely to meet the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' convenient access standards. Additionally, more than 80% of the Black and Hispanic/Latino populations in the U.S. live in cities.

Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) contracts with private insurance companies, known as Part D sponsors, to provide prescription drug coverage. Their convenient access standards require that at least 90% of Medicare beneficiaries in the sponsor’s urban service area, on average, live within 2 miles of a retail pharmacy participating in the sponsor's network.

Between 2010 and 2015, only 11% of the newly opened pharmacies were in Black or Hispanic neighborhoods that did not have at least one pharmacy already. Closure rates were also higher in these neighborhoods: White and diverse neighborhoods experienced an 11% closure rate, compared with 14% in Black neighborhoods and nearly 16% in Hispanic ones.

www.verywellhealth.com/pharmacy-deserts-impact-access-to-key-services-5184549

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I caught a similar piece on the radio the other morning and rolled my eyes almost completely out of my head when the 'expert' stated that theft in many stores might be higher in certain areas, but not so much that it would actually affect their bottom dollar?