Knowledge, attitudes and perspective on adverse drug reaction reporting in a public sector hospital in South Africa: baseline analysis

Abstract

There is an extensive need in Sebokeng Hospital for training on ADR reporting and implementation of systems to facilitate relevant processes; a need which may also exist in other public hospitals in South Africa.

Knowledge, attitudes and practices of health care professionals towards adverse drug reaction reporting in public sector primary health care facilities in a South African district

“…Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are a major public health problem that causes increased mortality, morbidity and costs, including increased hospital admissions and length of stay [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]. Physicians, pharmacists, dentists and nurses are in a position to play a key role in pharmacovigilance programmes; however, under-reporting of ADRs is common across countries especially in low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18].…”

“…Many factors are associated with ADR under-reporting among HCPs, referred to as 'the seven deadly sins' of pharmacovigilance [38]. These include a lack of knowledge about the necessary forms, ignorance of the rules and procedures and type of events that must be reported and lack of time and inertia, as well as lack of education among all key stakeholder groups [12,16,17,19,21,23,24,[37][38][39][40]. In addition, currently only a limited number of African countries have formal ADR reporting systems.…”

“…Concerns in LMICs include the remote location of a number of ambulatory care clinics and/or primary healthcare (PHC) clinics and poor telecommunication services, as well as low numbers of HCPs and inadequate training [44]. The knowledge of, attitudes towards and practices of spontaneous reporting may also differ at various levels of health care systems [15,16,19,24].…”

Creating and evaluating an opportunity for medication reconciliation in the adult population of South Africa to improve patient care

“…This must be balanced against published studies in public hospitals in South Africa finding 37 adverse events per 100 admissions, with 67.8% of these occurring during the patient's hospitalisation and 32.2% being present on admission (29). Furthermore, more adverse events to medicines occur within hospitals, including those in South Africa, than are currently being reported through voluntary reporting systems (3,(30)(31)(32)(33). This has increased the role of pharmacy technicians to improve patient safety through performing medication reconciliation (24,34).…”

“…Voluntary reporting systems, as part of pharmacovigilance (PV) programmes, are though available (3). However, typically to date there has been under-reporting of ADRs in hospitals despite PV programmes being a National Standard (33,(35)(36)(37). This is starting to be addressed through proactive educational initiatives (38).…”