As Drugstores Close, Older People Are Left in Pharmacy Deserts

In July, a notice appeared on the front door of The Drug Store, the only pharmacy in rural Kernville, Calif.After 45 years, the proprietor wrote regretfully, it would be closing in four days and transferring customers’ prescriptions to a Rite Aid about 12 miles away.As the news spread, “there was a real sense of loss, a sense of mourning,” said Roberta Piazza Gordon, who owns Piazza’s Pine Cone Inn in Kernville.

The pharmacy had served as a community crossroads where people chatted with neighbors and with the friendly staff.Its closing also created practical concerns.“We are an aging population,” Ms.

Gordon, 69, said of the townspeople.She relied on The Drug Store for her blood pressure and cholesterol medications and for anti-inflammatories after injuring her shoulder.Her husband, who is 70, also regularly filled prescriptions there.At The Drug Store, “you got your flu shot, your Covid shot, your pneumonia shot,” she said.Now those services require a 20- to 30-minute drive to the Rite Aid, which is in Lake Isabella and which Ms.

Gordon described as understaffed for its growing number of customers.“On any given day, there’s a line of 10 to 15 people waiting at the pickup window,” she said.Unlike The Drug Store, the Rite Aid doesn’t deliver.That leaves Kernville residents in what researchers call a pharmacy desert, defined as living more than 10 miles from the nearest pharmacy in rural areas, two miles away in suburban communities, or a mile away in urban neighborhoods.Nearly 30 percent of pharmacies in the United States closed between 2010 and 2021, according to a new study in the journal Health Affairs.

After initial years of growth, the number of closures outpaced that of openings from 2018 to 2021.“It’s an unprecedented decline,” said Dima Qato, the director of the medicines and public health program at the University of Southern California and the senior author of the study.Like many health disparities, reduced access to pharmac...