Focusing on Risk Communication About Medicines

Communication about the risks of medicines is not a new issue. Patients have long since sought advice about remedies, whether from family, healthcare workers or the wider community in traditional ways, or via websites and social media in today’s world. As pharmacovigilance professionals, interacting with patients, healthcare professionals, health policy makers, journalists and the general public has become part of our daily activity, in order to manage risks with medicines appropriately and reduce patient harm. So why is this theme edition of Drug Safety focusing on risk communication now? A decade ago, risk management was introduced into pharmacovigilance, and the implementation and evaluation of this approach are still subject to improvement in the light of experience gained so far. But it has become clear that at the core of successful risk management lies effective risk communication. This applies to formal risk management plans as well as to risk minimization action otherwise taken for a medicine and interactions between healthcare professionals and patients. Drug Safety has increasingly been a forum for discussing risk communication, and given that applying communication science to pharmacovigilance is relatively new, we thank the journal editors for now dedicating a whole edition to this topic. Articles were invited from authors with different kinds of relevant expertise and with a view to covering perspectives from various stakeholders and world regions. The resulting contributions include original research, reviews and opinion papers. It is perhaps not surprising – due to the still limited research – that often opinions are underpinned by experiences rather than systematic evidence, and this illustrates the need for further research. There is now an urgent need to look at old and new ideas for risk communication under a magnifying glass, in order to explore how to put established principles into practice and to experiment with new approaches. Why is this urgent? Avoidable adverse reactions and medication errors are still a leading cause for morbidity andmortality, and there are ongoing patient needs for information to facilitate treatment choices. In their article on patients’ expectations, Cox and Butt remind us of the need for information about benefits as well as risks and that prescribers may prefer to highlight benefits rather than risks of medicines. Referring to their own research, they stress that patients often lack understandable risk information and want their negative experiences to be taken seriously. This is described as fundamental for the trust of patients in their healthcare professionals and treatments. Furthermore, the authors discuss that differences in risk perceptions between patients and healthcare professionals may be a barrier to one-to-one communication. EDITORIAL Drug Saf 2012; 35 (11): 971-975 0114-5916/12/0011-0971/$49.95/0