Publication:

Knowledge, attitude and practices towards pharmacovigilance among health care professionals in a teaching and general hospital of South India

Background Pharmacovigilance is the science and activities relating to detection, monitoring, assessment, understanding and prevention of adverse effects or any other drug related problem from any pharmaceutical products. The core purpose of pharmacovigilance is to enhance patient care and generate the evidence based information on safety of medicines. The objective of present study was to evaluate the knowledge, attitude and practices of the healthcare professionals about pharmacovigilance and to assess the reasons for underreporting of ADRs.

Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted by administering KAP questionnaire to the healthcare professionals. There were 22 multiple choice questions. Ten related to knowledge, 5 related to attitude, and 6 related to practice. One question was asked to determine the reasons for underreporting of ADRs. The performance in each category was graded as good, average and poor if the number of participants giving correct/positive responses were >70%, 50-69%, 51.6% >36.8%) (p <0.001).

Conclusions Awareness campaigns, CMEs, workshops on pharmacovigilance should be conducted regularly such that good knowledge about pharmacovigilance can be imparted which can be moulded into good practice.