Background: Community pharmacies play a key role in the care of patients when dispensing antiretroviral therapy. The primary objective of this study was to describe patterns of community pharmacy use of women enrolled in the San Francisco site of the Women's Interagency HIV Study (WIHS). The secondary objective was to determine whether the number of pharmacies a patient uses is associated with specific patient characteristics or virologic outcomes in HIV positive women.
Objectives: The primary objective was to determine factors which were associated with using multiple dispensing pharmacies to obtain medications in a population of HIV+ and at-risk women. The secondary objective was to determine whether use of multiple pharmacies was associated with immunologic or virologic changes for the subset of HIV+ women.
Methods: A survey on community pharmacy use was distributed to San Francisco WIHS participants from 2004-2007. Poisson, linear, and logistic regression methods were used to determine associations between specific patient characteristics and use of multiple dispensing pharmacies and associations between multiple pharmacy use and CD4+ cell count or viral load changes.
Results: There was a trend towards an association between HIV status and use of multiple pharmacies (IRR=1.23; 95% CI 1.00-1.51, p =0.05). In multivariable analyses of HIV positive women, use of additional pharmacies (over the primary pharmacy) during the study period was not associated with statistically significant changes in CD4+ count or viral load.
Conclusion: HIV positive participants may tend to use multiple pharmacies more frequently than their HIV negative counterparts, though this practice does not appear to be associated with poorer immunologic or virologic outcomes. Future studies should be conducted to determine whether different patient patterns of community pharmacy use affect HIV treatment outcomes.
Keywords: HIV; community pharmacy; women.