Acting on its commitment to strengthen the Pharmacovigilance Programme of India (PvPI), the Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission (IPC), recently teamed up with the world health organization (WHO) country office (India) to provide a national level training programme for team of healthcare experts under various national health programmes such as revised national tuberculosis control programme and national AIDS control programme etc.

This initiative is specifically tailor-made to sensitise and update the experts on how to effectively identify and report adverse drug reactions (ADRs) arising from the use of the drugs running within these programmes. Most importantly, it focuses on training them on entering the required data into the VigiFlow, which is a secure web-based solution that improves the quality of ADR reports by logical and streamlined data entry.

Interestingly, apart from accessing the data from Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC) in Sweden, which is WHO's collaborating centre for international drug monitoring, IPC also updates information on ADRs that is being reported in India from across all its centres through VigiFlow to the UMC. Thus, Dr Kalaiselvan, principal scientific officer, IPC stressed that this exercise plays a very important role in ensuring that all the data generated through such national level programmes are regularly and efficiently entered into the global system, without any error.

This exercise, which was initiated early this month by Lov Verma, secretary, health, government of India aims at streamlining and closely scanning drugs that are covered under the national programme for major diseases like tuberculosis, malaria, AIDs, HIV, polio etc. Incidentally, IPC, which acts as national coordination centre (NCC) for the programme had laid the foundation for this almost two years back, wherein it focused on covering all the drugs that are covered under the national disease control programme.

Dr Kalaiselvan further added that IPC is taking all the possible measures to expedite the process of upgrading and updating itself with the latest requirements at par with the international standards for running a successful PvPI programme. “Healthcare providers, workers and the patients play a very crucial role in the success of the programme. Thus our priority is to sensitise them about the PvPI programme and make them understand about the importance of timely reporting of the ADRs to the higher authority,” he stressed.