Indian Pharmacopoeia Commission (IPC) will be adding 150 new Adverse Drug Reaction (ADR) monitoring centres across the country by end of 2014 in order to further strengthen the Pharmacovigilance Programme of India (PvPI). Through this initiative, IPC which acts as the National Coordinating Centre (NCC) for PvPI, plans to make the Indian pharmacovigilance programme as one of the most established and elaborate programmes in the world.
At present, there are about 90 medical colleges, laboratories and hospitals across the country registered under the PvPI programme, playing a very important role in monitoring and signaling timely updates on the ADR reports of the drugs running in the market. Through this ADR centres, IPC have been successfully able to collect a huge data base of 48,000 ADR reports from different parts of the country till date.
Dr S K Gupta, advisor to PvPI programme of India informed that the data collected through these centres are not only used to analyse and formulate drug safety measures within India, but is also send to the World Health Organisation's (WHO's) Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC) in Sweden to help them in strengthening and devising an effective international system on ADR's as well. India is among some of the select countries to have right to access the data on adverse reactions to drugs from across the world, for reference and monitoring within India.
Gupta informed that all the reports on adverse reaction from these 90 centres are assimilated through VigiFlow at the NCC, from where it sent to the Uppsala for others to access it. Interestingly, WHO had developed a common reporting forum with agreed guidelines for entering information in a compatible systems for transmitting, storing, retrieving and disseminating data.
It is understood that with a view to streamline the growth of the PvPI programme further, the commission plans to include all the medical colleges across the country under its fold. The commission aims to extend and attain its goal of setting up 350 ADR centres across the country by 2015, making the pharmacovigilence programme of India largest in the world.
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