Navigating the pharmacovigilance landscape: unveiling challenges and progress among healthcare professionals in Pakistan

Abstract

Background: Every country is trying its best to establish a strong pharmacovigilance system and some developed countries got successful in this too but the developing countries like Pakistan still lack the basic infrastructure to establish it and Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) is the only regulatory authority to report adverse drug reactions here. Peshawar, Pakistan has many tertiary care centres but still it lacks proper system to report adverse drug reactions and many doctors and pharmacist till today are unaware of it.  We tried to highlight problems and role of healthcare professionals in Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) reporting.

Methodology: A cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted in multiple public and private tertiary care hospitals from January to July 2023. The study included 190 healthcare professionals, and data were collected through a self-structured questionnaire. The analysis involved calculating means, standard deviations, frequencies, percentages, and one-sample t-tests.

Results: The majority of participants (82.6%) exhibited poor knowledge of pharmacovigilance. Knowledge gaps were identified in understanding pharmacovigilance activities, reporting processes, and the location of pharmacovigilance centres. Barriers to reporting included lack of awareness (15.3%) and resources (3.7%). Only 15% received guidance on reporting Adverse drug reactions (ADRs), and 20.5% knew where to report.

Conclusion: In Peshawar, Pakistan physicians are mostly unaware of Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) reporting and lack of knowledge, lack of training, work environment, and workload on physicians and pharmacist are the main reasons of under reporting of Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) as well as there should be other regulatory authorities like Drug Regulatory Authority of Pakistan (DRAP) in Pakistan.