Healthcare Professionals Knowledge Attitude and Practices towards Pharmacovigilance and Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRS) in India

The current prospective observational study of six month duration was designed to evaluate the Knowledge Attitude and Practice among doctors, nurses and pharmacists working towards ADRs and pharmacovigilance. A questionnaire which was suitable for assessing the basic Knowledge, Attitude and the Practice (KAP) of pharmacovigilance was designed and distributed among healthcare professionals in a tertiary care teaching hospital of south India. Among the total 220 healthcare professionals working in the hospital only 75 % (n=165) provided their responses. Of these responses 45.45 % (n= 100) were analyzed and the rest were not included because of incomplete information. The study showed that the knowledge of Healthcare professionals in general was less about the National Pharmacovigilance Programme and its members, International centre and the WHO online database of monitoring and reporting ADRs. The results of the study strongly suggest that underreporting of ADRs is associated with gaps in the knowledge and attitudes.