A Collaborative Program between Pharmacists and Nurses to Improve Spontaneous Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting System in Prapokklao Hospital, Thailand

Abstract

Objectives: 1) to evaluate the collaborative program between pharmacists and nurses in improving the spontaneous reporting system of adverse drug reaction (ADR) in Prapokklao hospital; 2) to explore the impact of the collaborative program on knowledge of nurses about ADRs, the capability of nurses to detect and report ADRs, and the level of job satisfaction on the new roles of nurses in the experimental group. Methods: This programmatic research employed several methods including experimental approach which categorized nurses into experimental and control groups, and then compared knowledge as well as performance of nurses in detecting and reporting ADRs between both groups, and before and after training program. Eight out of 52 nurses in the experimental group were trained with knowledge about ADRs, and how to detect and report ADRs in hospitalized patients. The rest of them (44 nurses) in the experimental group obtained knowledge from researchers and training nurses. Nurses in both experimental and control groups were assessed about knowledge regarding ADRs before and after the introduction of the collaborative program, performance of nurses in monitoring and reporting ADRs compared to pharmacists, and job satisfaction of nurses in the experimental group by using an adapted questionnaire. The samples were nurses who were responsible to patient's charts in both groups. The study period started from December 2004 to June 2005. Results: Eight nurses trained by the program had a higher score of knowledge than before training. Forty-four nurses who were in the experimental group also had higher scores of post-test at the third month of investigation, compared to the baseline. Differences in the pre and post-test scores between nurses in experimental and control groups were statistically significant at 0.05. Intensive ADR monitoring carried out by pharmacists indicated that experimental wards had 3,572 patients with 371 ADR problems, while control wards had 3,467 patients with 266 problems. Nurses in the experimental groups could correctly report 174 problems of ADRs (46.9%), while 29 problems (10.9%) were reported by their counterparts. The difference in the capability to reporting ADR was at the significance level of 0.05. Nanrajo algorithm showed the level of probability and, the difference in the proportion of ADR reported by the experimental group was fourfold to the control group. This collaborative program between pharmacists and nurses significantly improved performance and knowledge of nurse as well as spontaneous ADR reporting system in Prapokklao hospital.