Pharmacovigilance and Its Importance for Primary Health Care Professionals

Abstract

Pharmacovigilance is used to detect, assess, understand, and prevent the adverse effects of medications. The need for safety monitoring has evolved around unfortunate incidents in history, with deaths caused by anesthesia and congenital malformations from thalidomide use. Reports from adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are stored in a global database and can be used to evaluate the associations between various medications and associated ADRs. Clinicians play an important role in the recognition and reporting of ADRs to national pharmacovigilance centers (NPCs). The purpose of NPCs is to make the clinicians understand their functions, including the monitoring, investigation, and assessment of ADR reports, along with periodical benefit-risk assessments of medications via multiple sources. A case study on NPCs and the types of safety issues evaluated by them are provided to illustrate their role in medicine safety surveillance. ADR monitoring was also combined with vaccine safety surveillance approaches. Overall, this study will provide insights to clinicians on the importance of pharmacovigilance in maintaining patient safety with the proper use of medications.