Scholarly literature on nurses and pharmacogenomics: A scoping review.

BACKGROUND: Pharmacogenomics is the bioscience investigating how genes affect medication responses. Nurses are instrumental in medication safety. Pharmacogenomics is slowly being integrated into healthcare, and knowledge and understanding of it is now pertinent to nursing practice.

PURPOSE: This paper aims to map the scholarly literature on pharmacogenomics in relation to nurses.

METHODS: A scoping review was conducted in four databases: CINAHL, Embase (Ovid), ProQuest Health and Medicine and PubMed using the search terms pharmacogenomic*, pharmacogenetic*, PGx*, and nurs*, resulting in 263 articles of which 77 articles met the inclusion criteria.

FINDINGS: Most articles (85 %, n = 65) were non-empirical and 12 presented empirical data (15 %, n = 12). The articles were USA-centric (81 %, n = 62) and represented a broad range of nursing specialties.

CONCLUSION: The majority of scholarly literature on nurses and pharmacogenomics is narrative reviews. Further empirical research is warranted to investigate nurses' current knowledge levels and potential involvement with pharmacogenomics in clinical practice.