It takes time and money to visit the doctor’s office to get birth control. This is particularly an issue for low-income women, those who live in rural areas and teenagers who feel uncomfortable seeing their family doctor.
So four states — California, Oregon, Colorado and New Mexico — are trying to make contraception cheaper and more readily available by allowing trained pharmacists to prescribe and dispense birth control pills, patches, injections and vaginal rings. However, pharmacists aren’t required to participate and few do, according to a new study.
University of California, Berkeley researchers investigated the availability and cost of pharmacist-prescribed contraception in California using a telephone audit survey of approximately 1000 community-based, retail pharmacies. Although randomly selected, most of the pharmacies were in urban areas and affiliated with retail chains, like CVS.
Posing as patients, they called the pharmacies and said, “I heard that you can get birth control from a pharmacy without a prescription from your doctor. Can I do that at your pharmacy?” If the answer was yes, then the researcher asked follow-up questions to identify the types of birth control available and the service fee.
The study found that pharmacy-prescribed birth control was available in only 11 percent of the surveyed pharmacies, with no availability differences between the rural or urban stores. They also determined that most participating pharmacies charged a service fee between $40 and $45.
“Our findings strongly suggest that more pharmacies need to offer this service to live up to the promise of widespread, easier access to birth control,” said lead author Anu Manchikanti Gómez, PhD, an assistant professor of social welfare at UC Berkeley, in a recent news release.
The authors noted that the current service fees may make birth control too expensive for some low-income women. They are hopeful this will improve once California’s Medicaid program starts reimbursing pharmacists for these services, which is required by July 2021.
They conclude the paper with a call for more research to identify the barriers to birth control accessibility.
This is a reposting of my Scope blog story, courtesy of Stanford School of Medicine.
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