There are two closely connected primary dimensions of educational need associated with the field of pharmacovigilance.
Teaching and
Learning Pharmacovigilance
There
are two closely connected primary dimensions of educational need associated
with the field of pharmacovigilance. The principal dimension is that of the
clinical practitioner who needs knowledge, under-standing and wisdom about
effects of pharmaceuticals in their day-to-day healthcare practice. The
secondary dimension is that of professionals in the field who must amass and
evaluate emerging evidence from broad populations exposed to pharmacotherapies.
A vital nexus between these two dimensions is found in the spontaneous adverse
drug reaction (ADR) report that, for many years to come, is likely to remain a
key element in the intelligence-gathering systems of professional
pharmacovigilists.
The
educational needs of practitioners in each of these fields have considerable
interdependency. On the one hand, beyond personal empirical obser-vation, the
healthcare practitioner needs to learn to continually discriminate benefits and
risks associ-ated with the pharmacotherapies they are supervising. On the other
hand, the professional pharmacovigilist needs to develop and maintain the same
fundamental clinical knowledge and discriminatory skill as well as mastery of
increasingly complex systems of signal generation, systematic investigation of
signal mean-ing and effective communication back to the public and healthcare
practitioners.
This
chapter therefore addresses the educational needs, opportunities and challenges
for both groups: characterized here as learners and teachers of
phar-macovigilance.
In
recent years, two significant political under-currents have powerfully
influenced the field of pharmacovigilance: these currents have created a
notable undertow that has magnified interest in and extended the scope of
teaching in this field. Addi-tionally, these forces have resulted in a more
lively interest in the communication of findings from the field of
pharmacovigilance to those engaged in over-seeing pharmacotherapy in practice.
The
first of these currents derives from publicity and revitalized public interest
in mistakes and mishaps in conventional healthcare provisions. The second has
emerged from concerns about medicinal drug therapy, and the contemporary
expectation that available ther-apies should be uniformly ‘safe’ in customary
use. Both of these movements will be examined in this chapter. Implications
will be discussed for both the individual practitioner’s need to learn
pharmacovigi-lance in the care of their patients and also for training health
professionals in pharmacovigilance manage-ment techniques.
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