Awareness of Adverse Drug Reaction Monitoring and Practice among Student Nurses

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) accounts for significant morbidity and mortality. Nurses will play a vital role in monitoring and reporting of ADRs. To monitor and voluntarily report the ADR the nursing students should have sound knowledge on monitoring and reporting of ADRs. Hence this study was undertaken to assess the awareness amongst student nurses with regard to knowledge, attitude and practice of adverse drug reaction monitoring and reporting.

In this questionnaire based study, 80 student nurses posted for clinical rotation from two nursing schools of Karwar, in district hospital Karwar (a secondary level healthcare facility) were distributed pre-validated questionnaire. A predetermined scoring method is used to convert the response of these questions. Suitable statistical test was applied to assess the statistical significance.

It has been found out that, the knowledge score was considerably less (32.36±1.01) when compared to attitude and practice scores (.35±1.74 and 41.39±1.67 respectively). There was a very high statistical significance between the three domains (P<0.0001). 64% students felt that reporting of ADRs is important to improve the patient safety. Majority of the students also felt that (89%) that awareness program on ADR should be frequently conducted to update the knowledge on ADRs.

We conclude from our study the knowledge on adverse drug reaction is poor among student nurses though they have a good attitude and practice skills of monitoring and reporting ADR.