According to National Survey, nearly 80 million of Indians reside in rural areas, consuming medicines for various diseases and data from them are absolutely essential to make Pharmacovigilance Programme of India (PvPI) penultimate. Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) extended this service. ICMR-based rural pharmacovigilance comprises allocating funds to ADR monitoring centers (AMCs) and employing a qualified pharmacist to collect drug safety data of the community in which they are posted and submit it to the nearest AMCs.[1]
PATIENT INITIATED MEDICINE SAFETY REPORTING
The hallmark of PvPI, India is the introduction of medicine drug side effects reporting. Undoubtedly, this is successful in western and European nations. The complexity involved in implementing this in our country including people of diverse culture and language, low literacy has been overcome by introducing simple drug side effect reporting form, called 'blue form' against conventional 'red form' used by health-care workers. Direct consumer reporting is further facilitated by availability of forms in eleven Indian vernacular languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Marathi, etc.[2] This increases autonomy of patients to report adverse effects from over the counter drugs, out of participation in clinical trials and due to conventional medicines. Patient/consumer can report through toll-free number 1800 180 3024 or forms can be E-mailed to pvpi.compat@gmail.com.Introduction of various measures to increase pharmacovigilance seems to be effective and optimistic. Every medical professionals, paramedical staffs, and patients should be under their responsibility in contributing the drug safety measures failing which the results may not be appreciable.[3]