Adverse drug reactions and a program of voluntary notification: an opinion survey of primary care physicians

To discover the view of primary care doctors on aspects of the safety of medicines, their knowledge of the programme of automatic notification of negative side-effects of medicines (NSEM), their opinion of the programme and factors affecting low notification. A survey of views. Madrid's Health Area 1. General practitioners and paediatricians (n = 417). 281 doctors (67.4%) replied. 88.4% (48 + 40.4%) said they included questions on possible side-effects in the case history interview (always or almost always). 58.2% suspected at least one negative side-effect each month. Doctors are very interested in detecting and identifying the NSEM of their patients, and therefore believe that a centralised system to record NSEM should be set up.