The safety of medicines in public health programmes: pharmacovigilance an essential tool

Overview

The integration of pharmacovigilance may be crucial to the success of public health programmes using medicines. This document demonstrates that pharmacovigilance can and should be an integral part of every public health programme that uses medicines in order to optimize the use of scarce health resources and prevent potential tragedies. To explain how that might happen, and why, is the purpose of this report.