Prescription Drug Labeling Medication Errors: A Big Deal for Pharmacists

Today, in the health care profession, all types of medication errors including missed dose, wrong dosage forms, wrong time interval, wrong route, etc., are a big deal for better patient care. Today, problems related to medications are common in the healthcare profession, and are responsible for significant morbidity, mortality, and cost. Several recent studies have demonstrated that patients frequently have difficulty in reading and understanding medication labels. According to the Institute of Medicine report, “Preventing Medication Errors”, cited poor labeling as a central cause for medication errors in the USA. Evidence suggests that specific content and format of prescription drug labels facilitate communication with and comprehension by patients. Efforts to improve the labels should be guided by such evidence, although an additional study assessing the influence of label design on medication-taking behavior and health outcomes is needed. Several policy options exist to require minimal standards to optimize medical therapy, particularly in light of the new Medicare prescription drug benefit

Pharmacovigilance: A Worldwide Master Key for Drug Safety Monitoring

Pharmacovigilance is like a sunshade to describe the processes for monitoring and evaluating ADRs and it is a key component of effective drug regulation systems, clinical practice and public health programmes. The number of Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) reported resulted in an increase in the volume of data handled, and to understand the pharmacovigilance, a high level of expertise is required to rapidly detect drug risks as well as to defend the product against an inappropriate removal. The current global network of pharmacovigilance centers, coordinated by the Uppsala Monitoring Centre, would be strengthened by an independent system of review. This would consider litigious and important drug safety issues that have the potential to affect public health adversely beyond national boundaries. Recently, pharmacovigilance has been confined, mainly to detect adverse drug events that were previously either unknown or poorly understood. Pharmacovigilance is an important and integral part of clinical research and these days it is growing in many countries. Today many pharmacovigilance centers are working for drug safety monitoring in this global pitch, however, at the turn of the millennium pharmacovigilance faces major challenges in aspect of better safety and monitoring of drugs. In this review we will discuss about drug safety, worldwide pharmacovigilance centers and their role, benefits and challenges of pharmacovigilance and its future consideration in healthcare sectors