The Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission (IPC), Ghaziabad, under the Union health ministry, will be holding talks between May 17-18, 2018 with Sweden based Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC) to harmonise and integrate pharmacovigilance (PV) with public health programmes of member countries for access to public health and affordable drugs.

This will also help build collaborations with national regulatory authorities globally to fulfil 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 adverse drug reactions (ADRs) that is 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 who is leading the delegation will discuss with the UMC team at Sweden on the 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 Authority (CDSCO) had initiated PvPI in July 2010 with Ghaziabad-based IPC as the national co-ordinating centre (NCC).

This comes at a time when IPC is also collaborating with South East Asia Regulatory Network (SEARN) nations towards integrating their public health programmes with PV activities for drug safety. This will develop regulatory collaboration, convergence and reliance in the South-East Asia region over shared regulatory issues.

This is very much relevant as many of the medicines used in public health programmes are new and have safety concerns associated with them. This includes collaboration with WHO and others on the establishment and training of a PV field force to actively assemble case information from the programme treatment centres.

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 will serve as the eighth centre.

UMC was the first WHO Collaborating Centre to be established for PV when, in 1978, the scientific and technical responsibility of the WHO programme for international drug monitoring was transferred to Sweden.

IPC which has recently been designated as the WHO collaborative centre for PV in public health, will be focusing on TB, neglected tropical diseases, vector-borne diseases, HIV-AIDS among other such challenges as part of integrating PV programmes in public health systems for SEARN member countries.