Social workers have only recently, relatively speaking, begun to be involved completely in medication and its issues with their clients. The problems that accompany that are several: clients don't take their meds regularly as prescribed (adherence) or not at all; some abuse medication by taking too much or something other than prescribed; some have difficulty obtaining meds, either financially or due to lack of primary healthcare. It is this last that this paper is about. Dziegielewski (2011) discusses how pharmacological information is crucial for patients to have, and social workers need to know everything they can about which medicines accompany which conditions so that they can be in a much better position to advise clients and to promote medicine adherence.
I recently spoke with _______________, a clinical social worker who is involved in locating sources of medications for clients who have been unable to do that.
ME: How would you go about finding help?
SW: Perhaps the best-known organization for providing free or low-cost medications is the Partnership for Prescription Assistance, or PPA (2014). It is an organization that has a great many partners in healthcare and also a great number of pharmaceutical partners who offer their medications to indigent clients for free or for a reduced cost. That's usually where I turn to first.
ME: What exactly is your role in all this?
SW: For the most part. it's really pretty simple. PAPs [patient assistance programs] use forms for individual drugs. We fill those out when we know which drugs a client needs. We also fill out drug company forms, which are somewhat more complicated. When all that's done, we send the forms to the client for signature. Once they're signed, they send them back to us and we forward them to the pharmaceutical companies (University of Florida Health, 2014).
ME: What about people who are trying to get insurance under the ACA?
SW: The important thing is awareness (Bias, Agarwal and Fitzgerald, 2015), of course. So we talk about that a lot.
ME: There's something I'd really like to know about the prescriptions you are able to secure. Is it always cheaper generic drugs, or the more expensive originals?
SW: If the client has any out-of-pocket costs, of course we try to get generics. But sometimes there aren't any generics available, so we have to go with the originals. And that's expensive (Howard, 2014).
ME: Is there anything else?
SW: There really is no reason for anyone to ever be without medication. For some people, medication is the primary reason they are still living, such as someone with Type I insulin-dependent diabetes. For others, it just makes life so much easier. Whether the client can pay or not is irrelevant.
References
Bias, T. K., Agarwal, P and Fitzgerald, P. (2015). Changing awareness of the health insurance marketplace. American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 105, Sup. 5. S633-S636. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2015.302844
Dziegielewski, Sophia F. (2011). Psychopharmacology and social work practice. Oxford University Press. 2011. Retrieved from http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195389678/obo-9780195389678-0114.xml
Howard, D. H. (2014). Drug companies' patient assistant programs--helping patients or profits? New England Journal of Medicine, 2014, Vol. 371. 97-99. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1401658
Welcome to PPA. (2016). Partnership for Prescription Assistance. Retrieved from https://www.pparx.org/gethelp
UFHealth. (2014). Health Street. University of Florida Social Work Services. Retrieved from .http://healthstreet.program.ufl.edu/
