Indian Pharmacovigilance Day 2018 conference was held at Mumbai recently

Several sessions on medical writing, literature searching, evolution of India’s pharmacovigilance initiatives were held at the conference

The Indian Pharmacovigilance Day 2018 conference was held at Hotel Kohinoor Continental in Mumbai on July 27, 2018, as a part of the series of the Pharmacovigilance Day conferences organised in several parts of the world since 2014 and in India since 2016, by Italy-based conference-producing company EasyB srl.

Dr J Vijay Venkatraman, Managing Director & CEO of Oviya MedSafe, a global pharmacovigilance consulting & drug safety services – providing organisation based out of India and the UK, was nominated as the Chair consecutively for the 3rd Indian Pharmacovigilance Day following the success of the three UK Pharmacovigilance Day conferences in London since 2015 and the two Indian Pharmacovigilance Day conferences in Mumbai (2016) & Hyderabad (2017), all of which were chaired by him. As in the previous years, the agenda of the conference was well-crafted to suit the contemporary professional interests of the pharmacovigilance stakeholders in India.

The conference started with a brief welcome address by Enrico Pedroni, Managing Director, EasyB srl, Italy, followed by Dr J Vijay Venkatraman’s address as the Chair to the delegates about the nature and purpose of the conference. The first session of the conference started to sail with the topic ‘Evolution of India’s pharmacovigilance initiatives in the past three decades’ by the first keynote speaker Dr Urmila Thatte who went down the memory lane to share her experiential wisdom with the audience.

This session was followed by the second keynote speaker Dr Deepa Arora, who enthralled the audience with her address on ‘Pharmacovigilance capacity-building in India from an industry perspective’. The session titled’ Literature Symposium’ had Vasumathi Sriganesh setting the stage by re-visiting the relevant fundamental principles with her talk ‘Literature searching with focus on Pharmacovigilance’. She was followed by Dr Manoj Swaminathan who showcased the intricacies in searching literature for pharmacovigilance with the title ‘Special scenarios: MLM, local literature & social media monitoring’.

The last session of the day was aimed at demystifying the core functions of Pharmacovigilance. The session began with the well-presented topic ‘Risk management – The significance of collaboration’ by Dr Senthilkumar Saminathan who justified the title with several examples of collaboration. The final speaker of the day Dr Sanket Jadhav spoke on ‘Medical writing in Pharmacovigilance: Connecting the dots’ in which he highlighted the indispensable need of good medical writers, the qualities they should possess and the challenges they have to overcome in order to add value to patient safety.

The day ended with vote of thanks by Dr J Vijay Venkatraman and the delegates left the venue well informed with respect to all facets of pharmacovigilance in India.