Solidarity pharmacy
the importance of free access to medicines
Abstract
In 2006, through a partnership between the Universidade do Extremo Sul Catarinense, Cruz Vermelha and City Hall of Criciúma, the Farmácia Solidária (FS) project was created. This paper aims to demonstrate the importance of pharmacy for its users. In 2019, for six months, five patients were evaluated through semi-structured interviews, verifying the purchased drugs, those drugs that was not found and the provided savings. In the interviews with patients, it was found that all these patients stopped buying essential goods in order to purchase the unavailable drugs in FS and health unic system, and three of these participants reported discontinuation of pharmacotherapy and consequent worsening symptoms. During the research, the project provided an average monthly savings of R$ 285.55 among the five participating patients. The donation of drugs realized by FS benefits the population financially, ensuring access to medicines and enabling the improvement in life quality of the population. Knowledge of the FS project then becomes extremely important in demonstrating the numerous benefits it offers and motivating the design of new projects with a positive impact on the population.
Copyright (c) 2022 EntreAções: dialogues in extension
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish in this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors hold the copyright and grant the journal the right for their articles' first publication.
- Authors are allowed to enter into separate additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the paper (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or as a book chapter, with an acknowledgment of its initial publication in this journal).
