PAOLA — On a Monday afternoon, Rockers Pharmacy is hopping. The pharmacy sits on the edge of a large parking lot off Baptiste Drive, the main drag in Paola, Kansas. The building used to be home to a John Deere dealership. It has blue steel awnings and a neon “open” sign hanging in the window.
Although the building is fairly new, Rockers Pharmacy feels nostalgic thanks to a retro soda fountain and ice cream counter. Owner and pharmacist Nate Rockers said the counter was added not only as a revenue stream, but rather as a way to slow people down.
“Our goal in this pharmacy isn’t to rush people in and out of our door. It’s to get an opportunity to know our patients,” Rockers said.
In many independent pharmacies, like Rockers, customers are greeted by name. Pharmacists know a customer’s medical history, what is going on in their lives and what medications they’re on. This helps pharmacists catch mistakes in prescriptions and provide individualized care.
At Rockers, though a steady stream of customers come through their doors, the store’s profit margin paints a different picture. Rockers said in 2023, 20% of the prescriptions they filled were dispensed at a loss, and 50% were filled for only a $4 profit.
“When I say we dispensed at a loss that is just for the cost of the product,” he said. “That doesn’t include the time and the resources that we had into fulfilling that prescription, including the bottle, the label, the labor.”
Rockers Pharmacy isn’t alone. More and more pharmacies are closing nationwide, and patients are losing access to pharmaceutical care. These closures hit independently owned pharmacies the hardest, and in places like rural Kansas, they create pharmacy deserts, limiting access to pharmaceutical care.
That’s on top of the big chains closing pharmacies as retail shopping changes. New pharmacy options and growing retail competition have led the major chain pharmacies to close many stores.
Pharmacy deserts
Sometimes when pharmacies close, they leave behind pharmacy deserts, where people have to drive 15 minutes or more to access a pharmacy. A 2021 study by GoodRx found that Kansas is one of four states with the most counties that lack access to adequate pharmaceutical care.
“That’s because western Kansas is about as rural as you can get,” said Tessa Schnelle, board president of the Kansas Pharmacists Association.
Schnelle is studying pharmacy deserts in Kansas for her master’s thesis. She said pharmacies are closing at alarming rates, and the trend is speeding up.
That’s bad news for rural Kansans, because often when their hometown pharmacy closes, they are stuck driving long distances for something like a vaccine they could get at a pharmacy. Or, they have to receive their prescriptions by mail without one-on-one help from a pharmacist.
Though pharmacies are closing all over the place, Schnelle said pharmacy deserts, as well as closures, are hard to track. Until recently, the only entities tracking them were state boards of pharmacy.
Schnelle said when pharmacies close, they are required to sell or transfer patient files at very low rates to another pharmacy.
