Background: Adverse drug reactions are a major public health problem. Underreporting is an important limitation of all reporting systems, partially due to attitudes of health professionals.
Objective: This study sought: (1) to evaluate the reproducibility of a questionnaire on attitudes to and knowledge of adverse drug reaction (ADR) reporting among physicians, nurses and pharmacists: and (2) to compare the attitudes and knowledge of these three groups of health professionals.
Methods: This study targeted a sample of physicians (n = 30), nurses (n = 30) and pharmacists (n = 20) in the central region of Portugal. A structured questionnaire was administered to each health professional twice, at an interval of 2-4 weeks. Most attitudes were based on Inman's 'seven deadly sins' and measured using a continuous visual analog scale (VAS), with answers scored from 0 (total disagreement) to 10 (total agreement). Questionnaire reproducibility was determined using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC).
Results: The response rate was 100 %. Attitudes that registered the highest ICCs were Complacency (the belief that really serious ADRs are well documented by the time a drug is marketed) (physicians, ICC 0.84; nurses, ICC 0.70; pharmacists, ICC 0.99), and Diffidence (the belief that one would only report an ADR if one were sure that it was related to the use of a particular drug) (physicians, ICC 0.73; nurses, ICC 0.65; pharmacists, ICC 0.98). In most cases, there were no differences among the three groups of professionals in terms of attitudes and knowledge.
Conclusions: The Horizontal continuous VAS is reliable to detect the knowledge and attitudes about ADRs.