Impact of Educational Intervention on the Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice of Pharmacovigilance Among Nurses at a Tertiary Care Public Hospital

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.