Focusing on What Really Matters: A Patient Centered Approach

Advocacy and community service to underserved communities is the heartbeat and passion of everything I do.

As a pharmacist working primarily with poverty-stricken, low income and under-privileged patients, the major gap I see in our health system is a lack of intentionality in understanding how factors like poverty, education, age, and race/ethnicity impact patients’ health literacy and health outcomes, specifically in the African American community.

The largest percentage of my patients that are not adherent to their medications are Black. When counseling African American patients, there is a disparity in understanding their disease process, how their medication therapy helps to control or treat it, and how associated co-morbidities, risk factors, and behavior/lifestyle modifications impact their prognosis vs. their White counterparts. Some of my patients have been brave enough to tell me that they don’t feel comfortable with their healthcare providers because of implicit and intentional bias experienced during office visits. As a result, they’ve left the office disarmed and disinterested in their own health because every day hardships are waiting for them on the other side of the door. In other words, “my health can take a number and get in line with my other problems.”

The typical patient approach is detrimental to cultivating an environment where patients feel empowered to ask questions and seek understanding to make life-saving choices and decisions. The key to my success with improvement outcomes in medication adherence is personalizing every consultation so that it has relevance to patients’ day to day lives and the worlds they live in. Using medical jargon doesn’t work, but relating how controlled diabetes affects the likelihood of surviving COVID vs. uncontrolled diabetes does. It’s about connecting the patient’s interest in their health to what really matters to them.

Ashleigh Netter, PharmD | JenCare Medical Center