Public Awareness and Perception about Drug Safety in the Population Residing in Western India - A Questionnaire Based Cross Sectional Survey.

Drug safety is an important health concern for every individual on medications. Pharmacovigilance programme focuses on the reporting, evaluation and prevention of any adverse drug reactions and needs the equal support from every stakeholder that includes health care professionals, pharmacists and public patients as well. Public participation for reporting Adverse Drug Reactions [ADR] is quite low in developing country, India. Therefore, this study was planned with objective to evaluate awareness and perception about drug safety practice and adverse drug reactions reporting system among the lay population. A validated and ethics committee approved questionnaire was distributed to consenting participants residing in the Mumbai region by reaching to the lay public through the community centers and the responses were collected from year 2019 to 2021 to assess awareness and understanding about drug safety and adverse drug reaction reporting among lay public. A total of 1876 questionnaires were collected with a response rate of 75%. 86.7% of the participants believed drugs can have both benefit and adverse effects. 62.41% participants were unaware of any common drug related side effects. Only 8.04% of the public were aware of adverse drug reactions and reporting same to adverse event Monitoring Centre and 98.3% participants never heard of adverse event monitoring center. 66.57% participants learnt about the Pharmacovigilance program through our survey. Also, it was the patient asking the doctor about potential drug related side effects [37.58%] rather than the other way round [24%]. Although the educational survey created awareness among all participants, a greater impact was seen among the younger generation [18-30 years’ age group] irrespective of their literacy status [p<0.001]. We concluded that the Pharmacovigilance program of any nation needs health care professionals to sensitize the lay public to participate in ADR reporting thereby promote patient safety.