The Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission (IPC), which has recently been designated as the WHO collaborative centre for PV in public health, will jointly work with Sweden based Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC) to develop a system for gathering, analysing and collating adverse drug reaction (ADR) data through a new integrated system of pharmacovigilance (PV) for patient safety.
This is very much relevant as many of the medicines used in public health programmes across the globe are new and have safety concerns associated with them.
This signals a major development involving a long term partnership since 2010 with UMC with the conclusion of a meet between IPC officials and UMC team between May 17 and May 18, 2018 at UMC Sweden office.
Informed Dr. V Kalaiselvan, principal scientific officer at the IPC, “The main agenda of the meet was to host Asia-Pacific Training Programme on PV and ADR data management in the near future. This will also help equip stakeholders globally to fulfill their mandates of access to health, drug quality and patient safety.”
Currently, 131 countries across the globe are full members of the WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring at UMC.
UMC is WHO's collaborating centre for international drug monitoring and IPC has been assigned to update information on ADRs that are being reported in India from across all its 250 adverse drug reaction monitoring centres (AMCs) through Vigiflow software to the UMC in Sweden.
Scientific director of IPC Dr G N Singh led the delegation to UMC Sweden to discuss approaches and policy to harmonise and integrate the Pharmacovigilance Programme of India (PvPI) with public health programmes in other economies towards drug quality and patient safety.
Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation (CDSCO) had initiated PvPI in July 2010 with Ghaziabad-based IPC as the National Co-Ordinating Centre (NCC).
IPC is also collaborating with South East Asia Regulatory Network (SEARN) nations towards integrating their public health programmes with PV activities for drug safety.
There are seven WHO collaborative centres globally in PV and IPC Ghaziabad is WHO collaborative centre for PV in public health and regulatory services from India as the eighth centre.