Spontaneous adverse drug reaction reporting by community pharmacists: preparedness and barriers

Background: Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are undesired, unintended responses to drugs, and are signif-icantly underreported. Pharmacists are drug experts recognized as custodians of drug safety, who are expected to be prepared for and knowledgeable about ADR reporting.Objectives: To identify Egyptian community pharmacists' preparedness for and perceived barriers to spontaneous ADR reporting.Methods: This cross-sectional study recruited a sample of community pharmacists across Egypt, who were invited to complete a self-administrated questionnaire during April 2020. Results: A total of 923 pharmacists across Egypt responded to the questionnaire. Most pharmacists were knowledgeable about the definition of ADRs (93.9 %) and indicated they felt reporting ADRs benefits the patients (82.2%). Despite recognizing their public health value, only a small percentage of participants conveyed familiarity with the reporting process for both paper (19.2%) and electronic (30.4%) forms, indeed 56.6% of participants did not remember what the ADR report form looked like. Moreover, 75.4% of respondents said they felt that community pharmacies are not the right place for reporting, with 49% suggesting that reporting was the responsibility of physicians. However, only 32.1% reported having insufficient time being a barrier to ADR reporting. Conclusions: Community pharmacists in Egypt are not well prepared for spontaneous ADR reporting due to a lack of knowledge about the formal process and not acknowledging their responsibility, although time was not a major barrier. Therefore, this highlights a clear opportunity for improvement likely involv-ing targeted education.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).