Urgent need to modernize pharmacovigilance education in healthcare curricula: review of the literature

Objectives Pharmacovigilance education is essential since adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are a serious health problem and contribute to unnecessary patient burden and hospital admissions. Healthcare professionals have little awareness of pharmacovigilance and ADR reporting, and only few educational interventions had durable effects on this awareness. Our future healthcare providers should therefore acquire an adequate set of pharmacovigilance competencies to rationally prescribe, distribute, and monitor drugs. We investigated the pharmacovigilance and ADR-reporting competencies of healthcare students to identify educational interventions that are effective in promoting pharmacovigilance.