USC’s Dima M. Qato spent more than a decade working as a community pharmacist and public health advocate in underserved refugee and immigrant communities in Chicago.
Through her experiences and public health training, Qato — the daughter of a pharmacist and now an associate professor at the USC School of Pharmacy — has come to view pharmacy access as a human rights issue. Pharmacies are a frequently overlooked piece of the health care access puzzle.
As a pharmacist, she observed that people in low-income neighborhoods were taking days off work just to pick up their medications. And in some cases, they did not pick up their medications at all if the medicine was not in stock and the prescription had to be filled at another pharmacy farther away. Patients in high-income, mostly white neighborhoods did not really experience these access barriers, Qato said.
“The World Health Organization has considered geographic access to pharmacies as one of the key determinants of access to essential medicines for decades,” said Qato, an associate professor who holds the Hygeia Centennial Chair at the School of Pharmacy and is a senior fellow at the USC Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics.
“Despite the important role of pharmacies in providing essential medicines to the community, 15 years ago, when I started my PhD, no one really considered pharmacy access — not even people investigating health equity and disparities in medication adherence,” she added. “It wasn’t part of the conversation. So, I started asking questions.”
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