NIGERIA can improve patient safety and detect harmful reactions to medicines and vaccines earlier by strengthening pharmacovigilance among healthcare providers, public health expert, has said.
Dr. Istifanus Sako Usman, the Program Manager and Pharmacy Lead at Institute of Human Virology Nigeria (IHVN), told National Record that all healthcare professionals should be trained and required to practise pharmacovigilance; the monitoring of medicines and vaccines after they are introduced for use to identify potentially harmful effects and ensure their safe use.
He said healthcare providers must remain vigilant about how medicines affect the population, particularly because many drugs used in Nigeria, including those deployed in public health programmes, are imported or donated by other countries.
“Most of these drugs, especially drugs that are used for public health programmes, are imported; they are brought or donated by other countries,” he said.
According to him, the fact that a medicine has undergone clinical trials and been approved for human use elsewhere does not eliminate the need to monitor its effects when it is introduced into a different population and environment.
Dr. Usman said clinical trials for many imported medicines were conducted outside Nigeria, making post-market monitoring critical to identifying adverse reactions among Nigerians.
“When they do these clinical trials, and then they certify that the medicine is good for human consumption, it is now brought into our own climate where the clinical trial was not done.
“For this reason, we need to observe and see the effect of these drugs on our own people. That is pharmacovigilance. We cannot just observe and leave these cases; we need to treat them too,” he said.
Dr. Usman expressed concern over the low level of reporting of adverse drug reactions in Nigeria, saying evidence from several studies indicates that many cases go unreported.
“So many studies have shown that adverse drug reactions are underreported in our country. It has been certified that we are underreporting pharmacovigilance and adverse drug reactions,” he said.
He added that improved reporting by healthcare professionals would enable regulators and international health authorities to identify safety concerns and take appropriate action. “Healthcare providers need to improve on this because it is only when they are vigilant that they will be able to spot these adverse drug reactions and report them appropriately.”
According to him, reports are submitted to the National Pharmacovigilance Centre of the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) and subsequently contribute to international medicine-safety monitoring through the global pharmacovigilance system based in Uppsala, Sweden.
He said the World Health Organisation (WHO) relies on safety information submitted by countries when assessing the safety of medicines. “WHO takes decisions on medications based on the reports received from different countries,” Dr. Usman said. “So, if a country is not reporting, they are not doing their population any good at all.”
According to Dr. Usman IHVN has undertaken programmes to strengthen pharmacovigilance capacity among healthcare professionals and improve adverse drug reaction reporting.
“IHVN had trained hundreds of healthcare professionals in pharmacovigilance and established pharmacovigilance committees in many of the secondary and tertiary health institutions it supports.”
He said sustained investment in pharmacovigilance would help Nigeria detect medicine-related safety concerns earlier, improve patient protection and strengthen the country’s contribution to global drug-safety monitoring.
