Pharmacovigilance, a blind spot in future prescribers: Is real-life clinical pharmacovigilance education a solution?

Current situation Conclusions: While pharmacovigilance and ADR reporting are considered relevant for future healthcare professionals, healthcare students currently lack appropriate pharmacovigilance knowledge and skills for these tasks. This is probably because they have had inadequate and or insufficient pharmacovigilance education during their training. Although only a few high-quality educational interventions have been described, the competencies learned with these educational interventions appear to fade quickly. Active learning techniques, such as enriched pharmacovigilance education or providing students with responsibility for an authentic and clinical task, could be a more effective way of teaching and increasing the pharmacovigilance competence of healthcare students. Recommendations: In order to improve the pharmacovigilance and ADR reporting competencies of future healthcare professionals, pharmacovigilance education should be developed using active learning techniques, such as a maximally enriched (pharmacovigilance) educational context, and evaluated. Real-life clinical practice Conclusions: Real-life pharmacovigilance education seems more effective than traditional education and has a positive influence on pharmacovigilance in clinical care. Healthcare students who had reported or assessed ADRs themselves had a more favourable attitude to ADR reporting and had more and longer-lasting pharmacovigilance skills and knowledge. By participating in this learning opportunity, they also contributed to pharmacovigilance in individual patient care and thereby increased medication safety. Recommendations: Incorporating real-life pharmacovigilance educational interventions in bachelor degrees and replacing aspects of current clerkships/internships should be seriously considered. Moreover, these interventions should involve students from different healthcare disciplines working in an interprofessional team. Real-life interprofessional practice Conclusions: Interprofessional healthcare teams, learning from and with each other, can contribute to pharmacovigilance in clinical practice by detecting and managing ADRs in real patients. In addition, students have their first opportunity to work in an interprofessional manner and thereby gain insight into the perspectives and qualities of their future colleagues. Recommendations: Although the value of interprofessional education is increasingly appreciated, curricula should try to ensure that students work on clinically relevant, real-life (pharmacovigilance) care. Future intervention studies should further unravel the learning benefits of real-life interprofessional education.