Scholarly Literature on Nurses and Pharmacogenomics: A Scoping Review

BackgroundPharmacogenomics is the bioscience investigating how genes affect medication responses. Nurses are instrumental in medication safety. Pharmacogenomics is slowly being integrated into healthcare, and knowledge and understanding of it is now pertinent to nursing practice.PurposeThis paper aims to map the scholarly literature on pharmacogenomics in relation to nurses.MethodsA scoping review was conducted in four databases: CINAHL, Embase (Ovid), ProQuest Health and Medicine and PubMed using the search terms pharmacogenomic*, pharmacogenetic*, PGx*, and nurs*, resulting in 263 articles of which 77 articles met the inclusion criteria.FindingsMost articles (85 %, n = 65) were non-empirical and 12 presented empirical data (15 %, n = 12). The articles were USA-centric (81 %, n = 62) and represented a broad range of nursing specialties.ConclusionThe majority of scholarly literature on nurses and pharmacogenomics is narrative reviews. Further empirical research is warranted to investigate nurses' current knowledge levels and potential involvement with pharmacogenomics in clinical practice.