Reporting of adverse drug reactions by nurses

Schemes for spontaneous reporting of adverse drug reactions are important to post-marketing safety surveillance worldwide. In the UK, doctors, dentists, coroners, and pharmacists are allowed to report through the yellow card scheme, but nurses were not until October, 2002. We used a similar programme to assess the role of community and hospital nurses in reporting of adverse drug reactions. The proportion and quality of reports received from nurses was similar to that of those received from doctors: we received reports from one in seven nurses eligible to report, compared with one in eight doctors; 137 of 177 nurse reports and 676 of 984 doctor reports were judged to be appropriate according to regulatory authority criteria (95% CI for difference between proportions 1.4-15.0, z=2.3, p=0.02). Our findings suggest that nurses, who form the largest proportion of health-care staff in the UK, can play a valuable part in improvement of pharmacovigilance.