ven if she wanted to, Chatham resident Emma Washington, 77, cannot skip going to the pharmacy — she relies on 12 medications to stay alive. Most are for the high blood pressure she’s had since she was 19, she said, others for her worsening kidney condition and diabetes. She typically visits the pharmacy at least three times every month, as she said her insurance does not often cover refills for all of the medicines she needs in one trip.
This task was less taxing when her pharmacy, the now-closed Walgreens at 95th Street and King Drive, was roughly 10 minutes from her home on the No. 3 bus. Then, she could even walk there, if the weather was nice. Now, she must set aside close to a half hour to get to the one at 86th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. She takes two buses to get there.
With winter underway, Washington said she worries about how ice and snow might complicate her commute.
“Am I supposed to travel in that or wait until my daughter has a day off — if she has a day off — to get my medicine?” she asked.
Growing portions of Chatham and more than a dozen other poor Chicago neighborhoods, mostly on the city’s South and West sides, are becoming “pharmacy deserts,” say some public health experts. The term describes a community with limited access to a pharmacy, whether retail or independent. Hospital inpatient pharmacies are not typically included in these counts, as they dispense medicine only to hospitalized patients.
In Chicago, research has shown most of these neighborhoods share a mix of characteristics: Their residents tend to be low-income, immigrants, and/or black and Latino. And, experts argue, given the widening scope of services many pharmacies are providing, including physicals, immunizations, drug counseling, sexually transmitted infection screening and other laboratory testing — even access to naloxone, the medication used to reverse opioid overdose — pharmacies are increasingly important pieces of the national conversation around health care, especially where health inequity already exists.
“A lot of public attention focuses on insurance, but that’s not enough,” said Dima Qato, an assistant professor in the department of pharmacy systems, outcomes and policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who has studied pharmacy access for years. “Even if medications are affordable, if the pharmacy isn’t accessible, they're not accessible.”
In a study published in the medical journal Health Affairs in 2014, Qato and other researchers examined pharmacy access in Chicago neighborhoods from 2000 to 2012, finding that throughout the period the number of pharmacies was lower in minority communities than in white ones. Now, Qato is involved in a three-year program to further this research and develop solutions for growing pharmacy deserts in the city.