(058) Impact of Educational Awareness on Knowledge and Attitude of ADR Reporting Among Medical, Pharmacy, Dentistry and Nursing Students: An Interventional Study

Publication Number: 1054

Background: Studies on pharmacovigilance in India have shown poor knowledge, attitude, and deficient practices involving ADR reporting among prescribers and health science students. However, very few studies focus on delivering an awareness program among health science students.

Objectives: To determine whether an awareness program on adverse drug reaction reporting would change the knowledge and attitude of medical, pharmacy, dental, and nursing students

Methods: This is an interventional (pre-post) study conducted for three months at the KLE Academy of Higher Education and Research constituent’s colleges (N=4). The target population for the study was final-year medical, pharmacy, dental, and nursing students. Students were asked to respond to the validated questionnaire (consisting of 20 knowledge and 10 attitude questions) to evaluate their existing knowledge and attitude. Students then attended a one-hour training session on Pharmacovigilance and ADR reporting and then again evaluated for knowledge and attitude. The training sessions include information about pharmacovigilance, the importance of pharmacovigilance, and the ADR reporting process in India. For the knowledge section, the correct answer of each question represents a score of 1 and the wrong is 0. For attitude-related questions, the Likert scale was coded as strongly disagree to 1, disagree to 2, neutral to 3, agree to 4, and strongly agree to 5. The data was imported in SPSS (IBM version 22.0) from the excel sheet and analyzed by using appropriate descriptive statistics and inferential statistics.

Results: A total of 363 undergraduate students of various disciplines responded out of which 12 students denied to participate in the study yielding a response rate of 96.69%. A total of 351 students (93 pharmacy, 85 dental, 62 nursing students, and 111 medical students) participated in the study. Most of the students were females 224 (63.8%). Participants show statistically significant improvements in knowledge of pharmacovigilance and ADR reporting after the intervention (F (1, 347) = 246.31, P=0.001, ŋ2=0.42). There was a significant main effect of qualification type with higher knowledge after intervention (F (3, 347) = 4.03, p=0.008, ŋ2=0.03). There was a significant interaction between the pre and post-intervention groups and the qualification. (F (3, 347) = 2.81, p=0.039, ŋ2=0.02). Participants have a more positive attitude in the post-intervention group than in the pre-intervention group (F (1, 347) = 20.08, P=0.001, ŋ2=0.05).

Conclusions: Undergraduate health science students provided with educational intervention have a positive impact on knowledge and attitude towards pharmacovigilance and ADR reporting.