Affiliation:
1. Department of Clinical Pharmacology, T.N. Medical College & BYL Nair Ch. Hospital, Mumbai-400008, Maharashtra,
India
Abstract
Background:
Nursing students and employees remain the first point of contact in case a
patient develops an adverse drug reaction in hospital settings. Thus, it is important for nurses to
understand the importance of pharmacovigilance activity and implement the same in their practice.
They can also contribute to drug safety by reducing medication errors and adverse drug reaction
reporting.
Methods:
After ethics approval, an observational questionnaire-based study was conducted in 2017
that involved nursing students and nursing employees (N=390) to assess their baseline knowledge,
attitude, and practice toward pharmacovigilance. Participants who consented were enrolled and a
pre-training survey was conducted. Pharmacovigilance sensitization/ training sessions were conducted
in the same year after getting their baseline data. Three years later in 2021, the same questionnaire
was distributed to a subset of nursing students and employees (N=299) to analyze any
change in their knowledge, attitude, and practice towards the pharmacovigilance activity as a posttest.
Pre and post sensitization session questionnaire-based survey data was analyzed to confirm the
long-term impact of conducting such pharmacovigilance awareness training.
Results:
The nurses’ overall performance before and after training in each of the domains of
knowledge, attitude and practice were 17.53%, 72.86%, 39.69% in the pretest group, respectively,
and post test scores were 30.77%, OR-3.04, p=0.0 (Knowledge), 85.92%, OR-0.14, p=0.0 (Attitude)
and 37.21%, OR-0.08, p=0.08 (Practice) in the corresponding domain. Overall, there was a
declining trend in the practice domain of the nurses response between the pre-test and post intervention
groups however this decline was not statistically significant (p=0.08).
Conclusion:
Pharmacovigilance awareness training and sensitization programs had an impact on
the knowledge and attitude of nurses but there is a need to ensure that it is implemented in clinical
practice.
Publisher
Bentham Science Publishers Ltd.
Subject
Pharmacology (medical),Pharmacology,Toxicology
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