The Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission’s Pharmacovigilance Programme of India (PvPI) has now called for the presence of pharmacists in every district hospital to strengthen the monitoring of adverse drug reactions (ADRs).

The appointment of clinical pharmacists in every district level hospitals will help to promote patient safety. It will enable ADR monitoring & reporting, prescription event monitoring and antibiotics rational use among others, said Dr V Kalaiselvan, principal scientific officer at Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission.

The status in ADR reporting in 2015 was 47,365 as against 40,810 in 2014. There has been a substantial increase in ADR reporting under the PvPI from 2011 which was 14,664 to 22,930 in 2012 and 27,867 in 2013. In 2015, the ADR reporting status of healthcare professionals to PvPI which covers physicians, pharmacists and others indicates that the medical professionals have been increasingly responsible for this at 58.5 per cent compared to pharmacists at 22.1 per cent followed by other healthcare professionals at 19.4 per cent. Going by the ADR reporting by pharmacists alone to PvPI, the numbers in 2015 were  9,843, compared to 6,446 in 2014, 4,363 in 2013, 3511 in 2012 and 1,113 in 2011. This indicates the importance on the role of pharmacists in the healthcare delivery space, Kalaiselvan added.

In order to give a fillip to PvPI, the Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission had indicated that in the wake of under-reporting of ADRs, there was need for more pharmacists to enter the fray. It indicated to the Pharmacy Council of India that pharmacists had a vital function in addition to their responsibilities in drug dispensing and compliance and had to focus on ADR monitoring and reporting. For this the pharmacy syllabus needed to include pharmacovigilance and PvPI. PCI in turn informed that special emphasis would be provided on the same in the continuing education programme/refresher courses conducted for registered pharmacists as envisaged in its Section 4.2 of the Pharmacy Practice Regulations 2015, said Dr Kalaiselvan while deliberating on Pharmacists Engagement in Pharmacovigilance Programme of India: Status and Future Plan at the recent 67th IPC event.

The pharmacy professionals engagement in research institutions will facilitate active surveillance, Pharmacogenomics and rural/urban/tribal Pharmacovigilance. The ADRs reporting is mandatory for Pharm. D institutions and could coordinate with regional ADRs monitoring centres, he said.

The future plan at the international level for the PvPI is to strengthen the collaboration with the WHO, Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC) and coordinate with the SAARC Nations. Working  with WHO will support medicines and vaccine safety. Associating with UMC will enable signal detection in low and middle income countries of the Asia-Pacific region. Partnering with the SAARC nations will facilitate focused Pharmacovigilance for Vector Borne Diseases, he said adding that Pharmacogenomics along with training and education on Pharmacovigilance would be the emphasis in the future, he noted.