Information Sources for Drug Safety and Communicating Risks in Practice

Drug safety is an important goal of clinical practice, where healthcare professionals must balance the benefits versus harms of medication use to optimize treatment outcomes. To facilitate this decision-making process and subsequent communication of drug safety issues to patients and their families, identifying and utilizing appropriate health and medicines information sources are critical. Drug safety-related information can be obtained from numerous sources, including government/regulatory bodies, non-government sources such as drug sponsors and other academic, commercial, and patient/healthcare professional organizations. These sources contribute toward the publication of different information types, including research studies, product information, clinical guidelines, safety advisories, and patient information leaflets, intended for healthcare professionals and/or patients/consumers. Healthcare professionals should source high-quality drug safety information. Assessing risk of bias, currency of information, and the reliability and trustworthiness of information are practical ways to help evaluate information quality. Harms and benefits information is important for safe and effective use of medicines by patients. They can be expressed in several ways, and risk information should be carefully appraised, considering the context in which the data were derived and communicated, when applying it in clinical practice and communicating to patients.