Interprofessional Collaboration Between Community Health Workers and Pharmacists

Community health workers (CHWs) can bridge the gap between health and social services and the communities they serve. CHWs can work collaboratively with healthcare professionals, such as pharmacists, in addressing peoples' social determinants of health. However, little is known about how CHWs and pharmacists collaborate. We aimed to explore the interprofessional collaboration between pharmacists and CHWs in Australia and New Zealand and identify the challenges and strategies in their collaborative practice.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with pharmacists and CHWs in Australia and New Zealand, to explore (i) CHW-pharmacist interprofessional collaboration experiences, (ii) how pharmacists perceived CHWs' roles and vice-versa, (iii), challenges to collaborative practices and (iv) strategies to foster their collaboration. Interviews took around half-an-hour and were audio-recorded, transcribed verbatim, and inductively thematically analysed.

Twenty-nine participants (16 pharmacists and 13 CHWs) were interviewed, 19 worked in Australia and 10 in New Zealand. Participants reported that CHWs connected the patient and the pharmacist and helped bridge cultural gaps, shared patient-related information with the pharmacist, supported patient medication management and adherence, and referred patients to pharmacists. CHWs helped patients to take up pharmacy services and reinforced pharmacists' recommendations. There was a lack of clarity regarding each other's role, but pharmacists and CHWs acknowledged the benefit of each other's roles. Key challenges to collaborative practices were poor communication between CHWs and pharmacists, and lack of guidelines on the collaborative practices. Strategies to promote collaboration included clarification of their roles, improving the working relationship and knowledge of the mutual benefits of collaboration.

The study identified some collaborative practices between CHWs and pharmacists. However, challenges remain, including a lack of clarity regarding CHWs' roles by pharmacists. Future research should focus on improving knowledge of the mutual benefits of collaboration, and codesigning a CHW-pharmacist collaborative intervention with guidelines to standardise and foster collaboration.

Patients, service users, care-givers, people with lived experience or members of the public were not involved in the study design or conduct of study, analysis or interpretation of the data or in preparation of the manuscript.