Physician’s Knowledge of Adverse Drug Reaction in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Objectives: To state the physicians and dentists' knowledge and responsiveness of the adverse drug reaction (ADR) and reporting system in Saudi Arabia. Methods: It was a cross-sectional design of an authorized self-administered electronic survey about awareness and knowledge valuation of the ADR reporting system in Saudi Arabia. The electronic survey contained of demographic data and designated knowledge assessment of participants about the ADR reporting system. Results: The total number of participants was 151. Of those, 111 (73.5%) were physicians, while dentists were 39 (26.5%). Of those (93.38%) responders who perceived of the ADR reporting system and (54.3%) knew the diverse types of hypersensitivity reaction. Also, (45.33%) knew the official form of ADR reporting system, (43.71%) knew to reflect the ADR as sentinel events and (34.44%) knew about the legal provision in the medicine act that provides pharmacovigilance activities in Saudi Arabia. Conclusion: The physicians knowledge of ADR and reporting system was insufficient in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Targeting education and training is a planned goal to recover physicians' ADR knowledge and all healthcare professionals and ADR's documentation system.

Healthcare Professionals' Knowledge, Attitude and Perception toward Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting in Saudi Arabia: A Systematic Review

“…The KAP questionnaires that were utilized by the reviewed studies differ to great extent among the included 27 studies and did not follow a standardized validated measures nor standardized question items. Very few studies had indicated the performance of pilot test or applied internal consistency measures, which limit the development of representative conclusion assessing the knowledge, attitude and perception of HCPs toward ADR reporting [33,[36][37][38][39].…”

“…In general knowledge assessment of HCPs toward PV and ADR reporting indicated that pharmacists had better knowledge of PV, ADR reporting, and related policies and guidelines compared to physicians and nurses [16,21,27,33,39]. Knowledge comparison between hospital and community pharmacists revealed that hospital pharmacists are much more knowledgeable of the ADR reporting process, where and how to report ADR to the Saudi FDA PV system.…”

“…The characteristics of the included studies are displayed in Table 1. Ten studies included HCPs namely: physicians, dentists, pharmacists, pharmacy technicians and nurses [13,16,17,21,[23][24][25][26][27]39], 7 other studies focused on the KAP on community pharmacists [14,15,19,30,5,36,38], 3 focused on physicians [18,22,33], 3 focused on hospital pharmacists [20,31,4], 2 focused on hospital and community pharmacists [28,37], 1 focused on physicians and dentists [33], and 1 focused on hospital pharmacists [32].…”

“…Another question that was frequently asked was about the official ADR reporting form provided for HCPs to submit their reports to the NPC. Evaluation of the HCPs participating in these studies indicated that their knowledge ranged from 11% to 100% [18,19,[22][23][24]26,28,30,32,33,35,39]. Beside asking about the definition of PV and ADR few studies have evaluated the knowledge of HCPs of the International PV Center, its location, the WHO online database for ADR reporting and the common scale for establishing causality of ADRs (Appendix Supplementary file 3).…”