World Health Organization Launches Open Access to the Global Medicines* Safety Database

With

Dr Marie-Paule Kieny
Assistant Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO)

Dr Marie Lindquist
Director/CEO, Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC)

Dr Gerald Dal Pan
Director, Office of Surveillance and Epidemiology, US Food and Drug Administration (USFDA)

Dr June Raine
Director of Vigilance and Risk Management of Medicines, Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA)

*The term ‘medicines’ refers to medicinal products, including vaccines

Pharmacovigilance is the primary method used to identify hazards associated with medicinal products and with minimizing the risk of any harm that may come to patients.

It is based on timely information sharing and transparency, so that noxious and unintended effects due to medicinal products, medication errors such as overdose, and misuse and abuse of medicines can be quickly addressed.

To improve patient safety, increase transparency and encourage the reporting of adverse effects from medicinal products, the World Health Organization (WHO) will launch VigiAccess ® on 17 April.

VigiAccess is a new web application that will allow anyone to access information on reported cases of adverse events related to over 150 000 medicines and vaccines. More than ten million cases from over 120 countries are held in VigiBase ®, the WHO database of suspected adverse reaction reports and maintained by the Uppsala Monitoring Centre in Sweden.