Pharmacovigilance: Opportunity and Future Career Prospects for Fresh Graduates – A Report

Abstract

In India, surveillance of adverse drug reactions developed when most of the developed and some of the not so developed countries had established monitoring programme. Many of these had formed National Centers and joined hands with WHO collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring, being governed through Uppsala Monitoring Centre, Sweden. In 1989, Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) for the first time came forward to finance a multicentric ADR monitoring programme involving six medical colleges located at Aligarh, Delhi, Jhansi, Meerut and Vellore. In a span of three years, ADR data from 58,194 patients was collected and reported to ICMR. This programme was later on converted into a task force, wherein the centers were increased from 6 to 12 located at Aligarh, Delhi, Jammu, Bhopal, Baroda, Hyderabad, Vellore, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai and Guwahati. Both these multicentric studies were coordinated by Prof. K. C. Singhal.