Syrian pharmacovigilance system: a survey of pharmacists' knowledge, attitudes and practices.

Background: The Syrian pharmacovigilance (PV) system consists of a PV unit responsible for all related activities at the national level. Pharmacists' participation in the system can play a major role in its efficiency. To date, little is known about the position or the contribution of Syrian pharmacists within the programme.

Aims: To describe Syrian pharmacists' knowledge, attitudes, practices and perceived barriers to reporting of adverse drug reactions (ADR), and to evaluate the sociodemographic effects within Damascus and rural Damascus.

Methods: We used a self-administered, cross-sectional, questionnaire-based survey conducted on a random sample of 656 registered pharmacists in 2 Syrian governorates.

Results: The response rate was 77%. Fifty-five percent of pharmacists had an acceptable level of knowledge about PV. Only 10.8% stated that they had reported an ADR at least once during their years of practice. Although 29.6% claimed they had reported ADRs to the Ministry of Health, 83.1% admitted that they did not know where or how they could get the official reporting forms.

Conclusions: Pharmacists who participated in the survey demonstrated limited knowledge towards PV and the Syrian PV system, and had relatively mixed attitudes towards reporting. Although they acknowledged the importance of ADR reporting, the current level of participation is low. The reasons for under-reporting were uncertainty of the fate of the reports, how they would be addressed, the complexity of the forms and the modest publicity of the PV programme.