Act for the future of community pharmacy

Abstract

Community pharmacies serve as a vital gateway to primary care and public health, offering face-to-face pharmacist expert care to assure safe and effective medication use. However, they are disappearing at an alarming rate, with 20%-30% of all community pharmacy locations projected to close within the next year. The objective of this commentary is to highlight the critical need for systemic reforms and collective action within our profession to address the unique challenges faced by community pharmacies, ensuring their sustainability and continued role in providing essential health care services for patients. Key issues and evidence are provided to help pharmacy professionals better articulate why pharmacy closures are happening now and how we can work toward a transformed future. Pharmacy closures stem from an unsustainable business model characterized by declining reimbursement for prescription medications, opaque and anticompetitive pricing practices of pharmacy benefit managers, and limited reimbursement for clinical services. Among these challenges, our profession has the opportunity to create a future for community pharmacy where every person has local access to pharmacist expert care and medications through sustainable, integrated community pharmacy practice. Our profession must embrace community pharmacy teams’ role in patient care, champion opportunities to integrate community pharmacists and their support staff as members of the health care team, and advocate for payment transparency and transformation. Creating this future will take all pharmacists and all pharmacy professionals.