Evaluation of Awareness and Knowledge of Pharmacovigilance amongst Final Year Students of Rivers State College of Health Science and Management Technology, Nigeria

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) till date are still considered as one of the main problems of drug therapy. Pharmacovigilance is the monitoring of drug safety by means of spontaneous adverse-effect reporting systems, case control and cohort studies. This study evaluated the levels of awareness and knowledge of pharmacovigilance (i.e., ADR reporting) amongst final year students of Rivers State College of Health Science and Technology, Port Harcourt, Nigeria. It was a cross sectional awareness and knowledge survey amongst 200 students from the eight Schools of the institution. Specially adapted and structured questionnaires were administered to the students to obtain information on their levels of awareness and knowledge on reporting of ADRs. Simple descriptive statistics was used to analyze the data that were obtained. The result showed that over 72% of the students from each of the Schools had good knowledge of ADR, about 62% were aware of ADR reporting system, while less than 50% had knowledge of the process of reporting ADRs. Final year students of College of Health Science and Technology, Port Harcourt have good knowledge of ADR. However, their awareness of the reporting system and particularly the process of reporting (pharmacovigilance) is poor and needs improvement. Keywords: Awareness, adverse drug reaction, pharmacovigilanc