Objectives: 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.
Design: A survey of views.
Setting: Madrid's Health Area 1.
Participants: General practitioners and paediatricians (n = 417).
Measurements and results: 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.
Conclusions: 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.