Pharmacovigilance Perceptions and Practice of Health Care Workers in Lagos State, Nigeria

Abstract

Developed and developing countries have established formal spontaneous reporting programmes to detect serious adverse drug reactions however levels of reporting are universally low and vary from place to place. This study aimed at documenting the perception and practice of pharmacovigilance amongst health workers in Lagos State. It also tried to identify the reasons for underreporting and steps that could be adapted to increase reporting rates in Nigeria. The study was a questionnaire based cross-sectional study. Multistage sampling method was used to select the hospitals (thirty four private and three public { government } hospitals) from where three hundred and sixty eight health workers were selected using simple random sampling. Eighty nine percent (89% ) of the respondents correctly defined pharmacovigilance and eighty- one (81%) of the respondents correctly indicated that the NAFDAC yellow form is used for reporting adverseevents. However only 15% of the health workers had ever completed NAFDAC yellow form while only seventeen (17%) of the respondents have been trained on pharmacovigilance before this survey. These findings indicate that although the health workers have a good perception of pharmacovigilance, there is little or no practice. To address this mismatch between perception and practice, there is an urgent need to educate and inform the health workers about the ADR reporting program.

Key words: Pharmacovigilance , adverse drug reaction (ADR), health worker.