Media contributions
1Media contributions
Title Patients under-reporting adverse drug reactions: Study Degree of recognition National Media name/outlet NewsGP Media type Web Country/Territory Australia Date 20/09/24 Description Despite many Australians knowing they can report ADRs, notification rates are low, especially when using digital reporting tools...
Professor Mark Morgan, Chair of the RACGP Expert Committee – Quality Care, told newsGP there are multiple methods of collecting ADR information, but any safety system that depends on event reporting by patients or doctors ‘runs the risk’ of missing ADRs.
‘Easier methods of reporting can certainly help, [for example], some of the recent innovations that send a text message following immunisation to ask whether or not there have been adverse effects are helpful,’ Professor Morgan said.
‘Adverse reactions from medicines might be harder to recognise because they take time to develop and may also not be easy to attribute to a particular medicine. This is why automated systems that use big data approaches to look for adverse changes in pathology results following initiation of a medicine should be piloted.’
And while Professor Morgan sees the value in digital reporting technologies, he said these should not place unnecessary onus on GPs and other healthcare professionals, whom already have a role in incorporating patient counselling about adverse reactions when prescribing and dispensing.
‘I hesitate [to suggest] that doctors should do more – every action by a doctor takes away another action that might be more important,’ he said.
‘The role of dispensing is meant to incorporate patient counselling about adverse reactions, but it is unclear how often the counselling at the time of dispensing happens.’..
‘I wonder if the responses would have been lower to an open unprompted question asking people to list where they thought you could report ADRs,’ Professor Morgan said.
Noting that international studies show that digital tools can double the incidence of ADR reporting, the authors say that integrating digital reporting options into widely used healthcare apps and patient portals would help to increase reporting rates.
Professor Morgan agrees there should be systems ‘to compare information internationally’ and ongoing safety monitoring of patients should be in place.
‘There is a need to use de-identified primary care data sets to monitor for possible side effects in the days, weeks and months after starting a new medication,’ he said.
‘De-identified general practice records can identify “reason for visit”, new diagnoses and recorded “reasons for cessation”.
‘Taken together, these data could form the basis of an automated post-marketing surveillance system to dovetail with convenient self-reported digital ADRs.
‘Automated post-marketing surveillance systems would certainly pick up on rare but devastating impacts. This is needed because the small numbers of people that new medicines are tested on in clinical trials means that rarer side effects will be missed.
‘Also, in the real-world use, outside of clinical trials, there are people with multimorbidity who might experience different ADRs.’Producer/Author Morgan Liotta URL https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/patients-under-reporting-adverse-drug-reactions-st Persons Mark Morgan