Assessment of Causes of Adverse Drug Reaction Underreporting in South of Iraq

Background: Pharmacy professionals, other healthcare professionals, and patients can all gain from a continuous adverse drug reaction tracking and reporting strategy. The purpose of pharmacovigilance procedures is to collect information on various aspects of the safety of pharmaceutical goods in general. Patient, healthcare professional, and manufacturer reports are the main sources of information on adverse events that arise spontaneously. Pharmacovigilance is a requirement for all healthcare practitioners, making pharmacists and doctors essential healthcare providers in responsibility of adverse drug reaction reporting throughout their practices and teaching the general public about pharmacovigilance. The current study sought to investigate and evaluate the main causes of ADR underreporting.
Methodology: Doctors, clinical pharmacists, and general pharmacists in the Basra governorate made up the study's sample. A total of (552) of the (900) healthcare providers who were the target of the study took part. Doctors made up 268 of the total participants (552), general pharmacists made up 225, and clinical pharmacists made up 59. This study, conducted in the Basra Governorate, covered 8 significant hospitals. A paper questionnaire was used in a randomly chosen observational cross-sectional study.  All data were examined using IBM SPSS Statistic version 26.
Results: In terms of the overall participant count, there were significantly more females (65.6%) than males (34.4%). Statistics show that the proportion of HCPs with fewer than five years of work experience (64.6%) is higher than that of those with five or more years of experience (35.4%).
Lack of clinical expertise among healthcare professionals was the major reason of underreporting.
Conclusion: The most significant causes contributing to the fall in the degree of documentation or underreporting in health institutions are the absence of clinical expertise for the majority of health staff and the failure to get information from patients in an appropriate, correct, and precise way.