July-August 2019 Indian Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences 633 Research Paper Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are the most common causes of morbidity, mortality and poor economical outcomes. Therefore post marketing surveillance is very important for monitoring the risks and benefts of pharmaceutical products after they have been marketed. The roles of pharmacists have expanded to other aspects of patients’ care, which include reporting ADR, improving patients’ health and economic outcomes [1] . The pharmacists traditionally have been playing the role of preparing and dispensing medications, with no or minimal emphasis on providing services to the patients [2] . Pharmaceutical care is a patient centric and outcome oriented process that requires the direct involvement of pharmacists with the patients to prevent diseases, promote health and drug therapy monitoring to assure the safety and effcacy of medications [3] . Community pharmacy as healthcare organization has a greater scope for providing trustworthy support and advice on health and drugs to people and delivery of such professional services by community pharmacies shall Impact of Continuing Pharmacy Education on the Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of Community Pharmacists about ADR Monitoring and Reporting M. DEEPALAKSHMI, PREETHI KUMAR, K. P. ARUN AND S. PONNUSANKAR* Department of Pharmacy Practice, JSS College of Pharmacy, A Constituent College of JSS Academy of Higher Education and Research, Ooty-643 001, India Deepalakshmi et al.: Impact of CPE on ADR Monitoring for Community Pharmacists The present study was aimed to train the community pharmacists in pharmacovigilance and implement adverse drug reaction monitoring and reporting program in their practice. Continuing pharmacy education programs about adverse drug reaction monitoring and reporting were conducted periodically to the community pharmacists both in the study centre and respective pharmacies and their knowledge, attitude, practice were assessed both prior and post education program through a self-administered questionnaire. The participants were followed-up after 6 months to assess the changes if any in their practice. Pharmacists’ awareness about the concept of adverse drug reaction reporting, which form to use for reporting adverse drug reactions, how and where to report adverse drug reactions have signifcantly increased (p<0.05) to 100 % in the post continuing pharmacy education survey from 84, 45, 51 and 36 % during pre-continuing pharmacy education survey, respectively. The knowledge about all the stakeholders of health such as doctors, pharmacists, nurses and patients to report adverse drug reactions also increased from 31 to 100 % (p<0.05) from pre continuing pharmacy education to post test. In the post continuing pharmacy education survey, 100 % of the respondents agreed that reporting adverse drug reactions is necessary. Majority of respondents (72.7 %) strongly agreed that adverse drug reactions reporting is a part of professional role. In the repeat survey conducted after 6 months, 11 % of respondents reported that they have a system of monitoring and reporting adverse drug reactions in their pharmacies in comparison to 0 % at the baseline, which was prior to continuing pharmacy education program and adverse drug reactions from 25 patients were reported to pharmacovigilance program of India by these pharmacists through the investigators of this study. The continuing pharmacy education program resulted in improvement of knowledge, attitude and practice of monitoring and reporting adverse drug reaction among community pharmacists as well as implementation of adverse drug reaction monitoring services in selected community pharmacies in the study region. Key words: ADR monitoring and reporting, community pharmacists, continuing pharmacy education, knowledge, attitude, practice, pharmacovigilance *Address for correspondence E-mail: drsponnusankar@jssuni.edu.in Accepted 26 May 2019 Revised 07 February 2019 Received 06 November 2018 Indian J Pharm Sci 2019;81(4):633-639 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as the author is credited and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms