LISTEN: Access comes from Senate Bill 195, which was signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp last month. GPB's Sofi Gratas reports.
Medication that prevents HIV will soon be available in Georgia pharmacies.
Senate Bill 195, signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp last month, clears pre-exposure prophylaxis and post-exposure prophylaxis, aka PrEP and PEP, for distribution at pharmacies as of July 1.
Pharmacists will have to complete training with the Georgia Board of Pharmacy before they can prescribe the medications. That training, or any other information about how pharmacists will be reimbursed for the prescriptions, hasn’t been released yet.
Kayla Quimbley-Young is the HIV policy coordinator for Georgia Equality, which is hosting a series of workshops leading up to the law's start date. It's an effort to answer questions that stakeholders may have ahead of time, and get the conversation started with service providers who may not be aware of the change in access.
Quimbley-Young said it’s important to prepare more than just pharmacists for this expansion of access to be effective. That includes community partners and non-profits that work with people vulnerable to HIV exposure.
“It’s going to take a village, a team of people to make this happen,” she said. “Whether that be housing, drug usage, or anything like that, we all have intersectionality in how those things overlap.”
A similar initiative run in part out of Emory University's School of Medicine aims to make HIV testing and prevention part of routine pharmacy-based care.
Georgia consistently has some of the highest rates of HIV in the country, in terms of HIV prevalence and the number of new diagnoses.
The highest rates are documented in the state’s urban areas, including Atlanta, Macon and Savannah, according to the Georgia Department of Public Health. That’s also where HIV medication can be the easiest to get.
While the rate of late HIV diagnosis, which leads to a higher risk of developing AIDS, has gone down in the Atlanta metro area, it has increased in counties outside of it.
Quimbley-Young said she’s hopeful that rural counties stand to benefit from the expansion in access.
“When you go further down South in the rural areas, we see less PREP access points, but we do see more pharmacies,” she said. “Pharmacies are the common denominator.”
The law requires every prescription come with a referral to a primary care doctor for follow up. The Georgia Board of Pharmacy has until January 2027 to release training materials for participating pharmacists.
