PQA Research Strives to Promote Health Equity

Pharmacy Times spoke with Melissa Castora-Binkley, PQA Senior Director of Research, about what specific research PQA is conducting to promote health equity.

Castora-Binkley: Yeah, so health equity is really important to us at PQA. It's one of our 4 pillars that we're working on. And we have a quarry engagement award where we have brought together over 50, pharmacy stakeholders and patients to better understand how to address social determinants of health in the community pharmacy setting. So there are many initiatives that are going on right now related to this. But as far as we know, in the literature, there isn't any that have really focused on patients and what the patients need to better understand how to have these conversations in the pharmacy setting, how to build trust, how to understand what to do with that information, how to follow up with them, how to make sure that any social risk or social need that was identified was resolved. So these are really complex issues. And we're really excited to bring together all these stakeholders and really figure out how to address this led by patients themselves.