Global patient safety in focus

Therese Lundin
Pharmacovigilance Specialist, Global Services ,

Uppsala Monitoring Centre
WHO Collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring

Sweden

Global patient safety in focus

The Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC) is a WHO Collaborating Centre which has provided scientific leadership and operational support to the World Health Organization’s Programme for International Drug Monitoring (WHO PIDM) for almost 40 years. As an independent, non-profit foundation, we build global and regional partnerships that bring together resources, expertise, and a shared vision of patient safety. UMC focuses on building global pharmacovigilance capacity by providing access to adequate tools and services as well as tailor-made support and guidance, especially to member countries of the WHO PIDM.

The start of this global pharmacovigilance network came about already in the 1960s, when children in many countries were born with serious deformities as a result of their mothers having taken thalidomide while they were pregnant. At this time, there was no system in place to collect and globally share information about adverse reactions. To prevent future tragedies of this kind, the WHO set up a pilot project in Geneva with the collaboration of a small group of countries in 1968. This was later made permanent as the WHO PIDM and operational activities transferred to the foundation WHO Collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring, set up in Uppsala, Sweden in 1978.

In the mid-90s the field-name Uppsala Monitoring Centre was adopted, and today one hundred people are employed working in different ways with pharmacovigilance support, education, research, signal detection and development and maintenance of tools, services and medical reference sources to support patient safety work world-wide. The WHO PIDM is also a platform for dialogue at global level, and UMC works actively to encourage networking and collaboration between national pharmacovigilance centres and other players in the patient safety arena.

At the core of UMC activities and the WHO PIDM is the WHO global database of Individual Case Safety Reports, VigiBase^®, which is hosted by the UMC. Member countries of the WHO PIDM contribute to VigiBase by sharing data from their own post-marketing safety surveillance systems, and currently the database contains over 14 million reports of adverse drug reactions.

National pharmacovigilance centres can search and analyse this global data and compare to national or regional data in their efforts to identify patient safety issues, which potentially need to be addressed. UMC is also regularly screening VigiBase for new potential safety issues and communicates the findings to WHO PIDM members for further investigation and decision on appropriate actions.

More than 11% of VigiBase reports are from low resource countries and the numbers are increasing significantly every year. Numbers are important, but even more important to remember is that behind every report there is a person, who in one way or another suffered from something unexpected and, in many cases, avoidable. UMC strives to raise awareness and efficiently communicate the relevance of medicines safety monitoring as an integral part of the health care system. We stress the importance to have political support, legislation, sustainable funding for activities, training of students and healthcare professionals, as well as collaboration with many different stakeholders.

For more information about the UMC and our work, please visit our website www.who-umc.org.

Here, you will for example find links to our recorded web lectures on a wide variety of pharmacovigilance topics, available free of charge. You will also find information about how to access summarized data from VigiBase via an easy-to-use interface, VigiAccess™ (www.vigiaccess.org), and about the recently developed awareness campaign for reporting adverse drug reactions, Take&Tell™ (www.takeandtell.org).