Abstract:

Background: The concept of pharmacovigilance involves sciences and all activities related to collection, detection, assessment and prevention of adverse effects. This is the first study done in Mwanza on assessing the awareness and practice on pharmacovigilance of pharmaceutical personnel, physicians and nurses its presence for many years. There is underreporting of the adverse drug reactions in the country and developing countries at large and this is because the concept is not given much attention by the regulatory authorities and the health workers.

Methodology: A cross-section was conducted in between April and July 2019 to determine awareness and practice towards pharmacovigilance among physicians, pharmaceutical personnel and nurses at Mwanza city. Convenience non probability sampling was used to obtain sample size required. Information was obtained using questionnaire and analyzed using STATA version 13.

Results: Large proportion of participants being female (51.23%), nurses (29.47%0 and with median age of 32 years. Pharmaceutical technicians had high level of awareness but poor practice compared to the pharmacists who had poor awareness and good practice, then doctors followed by nurses. Briefly the study findings show that there is poor awareness and practice.

Discussion: Poor awareness of the study subjects involved in the study was contributed mainly by lack of essential knowledge about the whole concept of pharmacovigilance. Compared to other studies, the results of this research show that percentage of awareness and practice has increased by very small percentage though it’s very poor. Poor practice of the pharmacovigilance concept is evidently seen on unavailability of reporting forms at the working place with respective regulatory bodies for reporting adverse drug reactions.

Conclusion: Awareness and practice towards pharmacovigilance among physicians, pharmaceutical personnel and nurses is generally very poor and this may be due to various factors that may have contributed to the poor awareness and practice of pharmacovigilance among the mentioned professions such as poor knowledge on pharmacovigilance, poor motivation and poor cooperation between health care works and patients.