Strengthening pharmacovigilance
'Optimizing drug safety monitoring to enhance patient safety and achieve better health outcomes' (MONITORING MEDICINES) was designed to learn more about the underlying reasons for adverse reactions to medicines. The project also aimed to reduce patient deaths and negative health impacts from undetected medicine safety problems. Spanning 4 years, the project included a consortium of 11 partners from Africa, Asia and Europe. During that time, the partners strived to coordinate and encourage greater involvement of all stakeholders. The result was innovative solutions that otherwise might not have been explored. The project focused on four areas: supporting and empowering patients in reporting medicine-related problems; strengthening the role of pharmacovigilance centres; making better use of existing data; and improving pharmacovigilance systems by developing additional data collection methods. Project members accomplished many of the original goals. The team produced a handbook, published by the World Health Organization (WHO), on how to establish systems for consumer reporting of ADRs. In addition, practical tools for web-based reporting were developed and implemented. To improve current pharmacovigilance efforts, guiding principles for detecting, analysing and preventing medication errors were established. MONITORING MEDICINES then encouraged national pharmacovigilance centres to use the information collected to deepen their understanding of adverse incidents. One aspect of this work included developing methods for identifying sub-standard products. Another goal was to help health care workers and the public retrieve information about ADRs related to HIV/AIDS treatment. By merging HIV ADR data from several sources into a common database, the team was able to develop tools for estimating ADR risks of individual patients. The project also developed methods for detecting problems with drugs for malaria and tuberculosis. MONITORING MEDICINES has laid the foundation for more work in this area. Based on current findings, additional research and best practice technology can be implemented to enhance patient safety.
Keywords
Pharmacovigilance, adverse drug reactions, empowering patients, patient safety, health impact
