IJHR Open Access Abstract Background and Objectives: Pharmacovigilance is central to the control of the menace of adverse drugs reac- tions. Despite the fact that development of policy and practice framework to improve patients’ safety partly rely on availability of authentic data on pharmacovigilance activities, knowledge about pharmacovigilance activities among healthcare professionals in Nigeria is limited. To help fll this gap, this study explored the awareness, at- titude and practice of pharmacovigilance activities among the healthcare professionals in the Nigerian Nnamdi Azikiwe University Teaching Hospital. Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional survey was carried out among healthcare professionals in the Nnamdi Azikiwe University Teaching Hospital, Nnewi. The participants were doctors, pharmacists, nurses and health records offcers employed in the teaching hospital. The sample was selected using stratifed random sampling. A structured, self-administered questionnaire was used as the survey instrument. Key informant interview was also conducted among hospital’s administrative offcers using standard interviewer guide. Descriptive statistics were calculated for the demographic variables. Quantitative data were compared using inferential statistics. Findings: Low level of awareness among the healthcare professionals about pharmacovigilance activities was observed. About half of them, 130 (50.4%), stated that they were not aware of the Nigerian National Pharmaco- vigilance tool that is used for documenting and reporting of adverse drug reactions. Only about one tenth of the respondents, 35 (13.7%), mentioned that they use this tool for documenting and reporting of adverse drug reactions whereas the majority of them, 220 (86.3%), stated that they had not used the tool. Conclusions: The study indicated that the healthcare professionals in Nnamdi Azikiwe University Teaching Hos- pital have a limited awareness about pharmacovigilance. There is also low frequency of utilization of the Nigeria NPV tool for documentation and reporting of adverse drug reactions. Our fndings highlight the need for educational and managerial interventions to improve monitoring and reporting of adverse drug reactions within an all-inclusive pharmacovigilance system in this country. Keywords: Pharmacovigilance, Hospital, Patient Safety, Adverse Drug Reactions, Healthcare Professionals Background and Objectives Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) continue to present as one of the greatest challenges towards the at- tainment of the gold standard of quality and safety in healthcare delivery worldwide [1, 2]. It has been shown that ADRs occur almost daily in medium- sized hospitals and outpatient departments [3] with overall incidence of 15.1 % [4]. Much of these ADRs (50%) were preventable [5]. Thus there is a dire need to develop effective strategy for detecting and reporting ADRs within the framework of a functional and efficient pharmacovigilance system. The negative effects of ADRs include high mor- bidity and mortality rates among patients as well as increase in legal, operational and patient care costs [6]. A study in the UK showed that 6.5% of people admitted to hospitals had experienced at least one ADR, and that in 80% of those cases, ADR was the direct cause of hospitalization. ADRs are also ac- counted for the projected annual cost of £466 mil- lion to the UK’s National Health Services [7]. In the United States, it was reported that over two million ADRs occur annually resulting in more than 100,000 Awareness, Attitude, and Practice of Pharmacovigilance among Health Care Professionals in Nigeria: Survey in a Teaching Hospital Raymond C. Okechukwu 1* , Sunday O. Odinduka 2 , Grace N. Ele 1 , Matthew J. Okonta 3 1 Department of Pharmacy, Center for Community Medicine and Primary Healthcare, Nnamdi Azikiwe University Teaching Hospital, Neni, Anambra State, Nigeria 2 Department of Clinical Pharmacy and Pharmacy Management, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra State, Nigeria 3 Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of Nigeria Nsukka, Enugu State, Nigeria *Corresponding author: Raymond C. Okechukwu, Department of Pharmacy, Center for Community Medicine and Primary Healthcare, Nnamdi Azikiwe University Teaching Hospital, Neni, Anambra State, Nigeria, Tel: 2348075854117; E-mail: raychuma@gmail.com International Journal of Hospital Research 2013, 2(3):99-108 www.ijhr.iums.ac.ir RESEARCH ARTICLE © 2013 Okechukwu et al.; licensee Iran University of Medical Sciences. This is an Open Access article distributed under a Cre- ative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which allows unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, as long as the original work is cited properly.