November 28, 2022
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy Professor Delesha Carpenter Ph.D., MSPH, funding for her project “Addressing COVID 19 Vaccine Hesitancy in Rural Community Pharmacies Reducing Disparities Through an Implementation Science Approach.” The NIH is providing three years of funding towards this project for a total of 1.8 million dollars.
Carpenter is an associate professor and interim chair of the Division of Pharmaceutical Outcomes and Policy. Her research focuses on developing trainings to improve patient-provider communication about sensitive issues, like suicide and substance abuse use disorders. She is especially interested in improving access to healthcare services in rural areas and directs a practice-based research network for rural community pharmacists.
Carpenter is the principal investigator on this project and is joined by Geoffrey Curran, Professor and Director of the Center for Implementation Research, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS) as a co-principal investigator.
The project will examine sustainable ways to support rural pharmacists as they implement COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy counseling practices to mitigate the negative impact of the virus in underserved rural populations. Conversations about COVID-19 vaccines can be sensitive and politically charged, so the team is working with rural pharmacists to identify the methods that work best for addressing hesitancy in the pharmacy setting.
The team believes the grant will go a long way to help reduce vaccine hesitancy in rural communities.
“I see this grant as a culmination of an idea we have had for a number of years — build a network of rural community pharmacies and then leverage their ideas, talent and commitment to move pharmacy practice forward,” said Curran. “As researchers we can do this by conducting large implementation-focused studies in partnership with these pharmacists. With the funding of this first R01 capitalizing on the infrastructure of RURAL-CP, the idea is becoming a reality.”
“Research shows that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy is higher among rural populations, who have some of the lowest vaccination rates in the nation,” said Carpenter. “Community pharmacists, as trusted and accessible health care professionals in rural areas, are well-positioned to provide COVID-19 vaccinations and address vaccine hesitancy in their communities.”
“The communication intervention that we are developing is guided by the expertise of the pharmacists and patients who work in rural areas. They are the drivers of the intervention’s content,” said Carpenter. “For this reason, we believe the intervention will be salient to people living in rural areas and not sound like canned messaging that was developed by people who don’t understand the concerns of patients in these communities.”
A major goal of the project is to test how well virtual implementation helps pharmacists deliver vaccine counseling, and to what degree that enables more patients to receive the vaccine. The team will also perform a cost assessment and determine how sustainable these methods can be.
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