Assessment of knowledge, attitude, and practice of pharmacovigilance among clinicians and postgraduate students in a teaching medical institution - A questionnaire study

Abstract

Background: Spontaneous voluntary adverse drug reaction (ADR) reporting is the backbone for the successful functioning of the Pharmacovigilance Programme of India. Aims and Objectives: These study objectives were to assess the knowledge, attitude, and perception of clinicians and postgraduates toward adverse drug reporting and to suggest possible ways of improving this method of reporting. Materials and Methods: The study was a cross-sectional questionnaire-based study. The study participants consisted of all the healthcare professionals (doctors and postgraduate students) who gave their informed consent and who were working at the hospital during the study period. Knowledge, attitude, and practices (KAP) questionnaire was designed to assess the demographic details of the healthcare professionals, their knowledge of pharmacovigilance, attitudes toward pharmacovigilance, and their practice on ADR reporting. There were 13 questions in all (five related to knowledge, five related to attitude, and three related to practice). One question was asked to determine the reasons for underreporting. These questions were designed based on earlier studies for assessing KAP of ADR reporting. Results: This study shows an above average knowledge of pharmacovigilance among healthcare workers to be about 61.80% and attitude toward the same to be 70% which seems satisfactory but falls back a bit with regard to putting all that knowledge to practice accounting for 50%. In this study, there was quite a gap between those who had knowledge and attitude (>70%) on Pharmacovigilance and those who had practiced it (