JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The number of overdose deaths in the United States (US) involving opioids continues to exceed 100,000 per year. This has precipitated ongoing declarations of a public health emergency. Harm reduction approaches, such as promoting awareness of, ensuring access to, and fostering willingness to use naloxone to reverse opioid overdose, are a key component of a larger national strategy to address the crisis. In addition, naloxone reversal directly and immediately saves lives. Because of pharmacies’ ubiquity and pharmacists’ extensive clinical training, community pharmacies are well-positioned, in principle, to facilitate naloxone access and education.

Objective:

In 2022, a single-site pilot study of PharmNet, a community pharmacy intervention incorporating naloxone distribution, awareness building, and referral, showed promising outcomes for both naloxone and resource distribution in the community. As a next step, this study was intended to be a pilot randomized, controlled trial of PharmNet in seven pharmacies. However, due to circumstances outside of the study team’s control, data collection was unable to be fully completed as planned. In keeping with open research standards, we transparently report all available data from the study and discuss trial barriers and processes. We do so both to provide insights that may inform similar studies and to avoid the “file-drawer” (publication bias) problem, which can skew the aggregated scholarly literature through non-publication of registered trial results or selective publication of findings affirming authors’ hypotheses.

Methods:

This paper reports an in-depth implementation study assessment, provides the available observational data, and discusses implementation considerations for similar studies in independent (e.g., non-chain) community pharmacies.

Results:

Retrospective assessment of study outcomes and fidelity data provide for robust discussion around how resource differences in independent community pharmacies (vs. well-resourced chain pharmacies), as well as high demands on staff, can affect intervention implementation, even when leadership is highly supportive.

Conclusions:

Community pharmacies, particularly independent community pharmacies, may require more support than anticipated to be successful when implementing a new intervention into practice, even if it might affect estimates of real-world effectiveness. Further implementation science research is needed specific to independent community pharmacies. Clinical Trial: All study elements are outlined in International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) PRR1-10.2196/42373. Although this paper reports results associated with that registration, results and conclusions should not be given the weight assigned to findings from a preregistered study.