ATTITUDES AND KNOWLEDGE OF MEDICAL PRACTITIONERS AT SALEM TOWARDS PHARMACOVIGILANCE REPORTING SYSTEM
Author: B.MAHARANI, PARAMESH KALAIAH.
Category: Pharmacology
Abstract:
Background and Objective: Spontaneous reporting of adverse drug reaction is essential for the success of pharmacovigilance program. But under-reporting of adverse drug reaction is common among medical practitioners. In order to improve the reporting rate, it's important to know the attitudes and knowledge of practitioners towards pharmacovigilance reporting. Hence, this study was designed with the above objective.
Methods: It is a cross sectional questionnaire based survey involving 300 medical practitioners working in government and private hospitals in and around Salem, Tamilnadu, India. It was predesigned to obtain the demographic detail, encountered adverse drug reaction, knowledge [awareness on existence of adverse drug reaction (ADR) reporting form, awareness on existence of pharmacovigilance centre, ADR on which disciplines to be reported, type of ADR to be reported, eligible person to report ADR] and attitudes of practitioners on pharmacovigilance reporting system. Collected data were entered in Microsoft excel spread sheet. Questions were analyzed individually and the descriptive statistical analysis was done using STATA 11 software. The relationship between experience of medical practitioners to encountering ADR and awareness of ADR reporting form were determined using Pearson chi- square test at p<0.05
Results: The response rate for the administered questionnaire was 83%. Majority of respondents were in the age group of 20-30 years. Male: female ratio was 152: 97. The mean duration of total experience of practitioners was 7.54 years. Knowledge and attitudes of practitioners towards pharmacovigilance reporting system was very low.
Conclusion: Proper educational and managerial intervention should be implemented to improve the reporting rate among the practitioners.
Keywords: Adverse drug reaction, Pharmacovigilance, underreporting
