Adverse Drug Reaction Center (ADR)

Introduction

ADR, as the only national center in the country, receives and files reports about adverse drug reaction from medial community. ADR center has been accepted as the official member of the international drug products monitoring plan of the WHO in 1998 and since then has been collaborating with WHO and its member countries in the field of adverse drug reaction. The main purpose of examining the reports received about ADR, is to prevent and reduce the rate of death due to drug side effects. In 2006, instructions for drug complications and medicines errors was announced to the Iranian universities of medical sciences from the MoHME and all of them were obliged to send the related reports to this center. Moreover, in 2005 according to the commission for drug manufacture and import, pharmaceutical companies are required to submit their reports to the ADR center.

Goals

1. Identifying side effects and interventions of the drugs which are unknown before being marketed

2. Recognizing the sudden increases in the known ADRs

3. Identifying risk factors and conditions in which ADR occurs

4. Analyzing and publishing required information for drug prescription and pharmaceutical regulations

5. Preventing drug side effects which are preventable

 

Services & Activities

The main activities that are done in the ADR center include:

1. Establishing relation with healthcare authorities, and local and national institutions and committees working in the field of medicine

2. Designing specific form for submitting reports on ADR and gathering information from hospitals, physicians and others through this forms

3. Publishing materials regarding definitions, goals and methods available in pharmacovigilance

4. Gathering and analyzing information about drug side effects and examining the accuracy of them

5. Interpreting and codifying reported ADRs

6. Codifying drugs suspected to cause ADR and filing them in the center

7. Identifying causal relation between drug use and reported ADR

8. Identifying drug safety signals

9. Examining the balance between advantages and disadvantages of using a drug and controlling the risks resulted from its use

10. Organizing gatherings in hospitals, institutions, professional associations in order to describe the principles of pharmacovigilance and the importance of report delivery and other educational activities that lead to enhancement of knowledge regarding ADR

11. Establishing relations with international organizations that work in the field of pharmacovigilance like WHO