This special episode was recorded at the mid-year symposium of the International Society of Pharmacovigilance (ISoP), 14–15 May 2025. Held in Uppsala, Sweden, the theme of the symposium was Improving information capture for safer use of medicines. The episode is an abridged recording of the concluding fireside chat, where Angela Caro Rojas (president of ISoP), Linda Härmark (director of the Drug Safety Research Unit in the UK), Ghita Benabdallah (national pharmacovigilance centre of Morocco, member of the IsoP advisory board), and Daniele Sartori (senior pharmacovigilance researcher at Uppsala Monitoring Centre), discuss patient engagement in pharmacovigilance.

The symposium was a collaboration between ISoP and UMC.

Want to know more?

• Visit the official website of the 2025 ISoP Mid-Year Symposium to learn more about its sessions, speakers and chairs.
• Not patient but im-patient – read about Sara Riggare’s research on patient engagement and other topics.
• Listen to Henry Zakumumpa talk about his study on adverse event reporting quality in Uganda in this 2025 episode of Drug Safety Matters.
• Read about the PhD project of Tommy Emil Dzus, Improving causality assessment in pharmacovigilance for safe and sustainable use of medicines in health emergencies, at Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway.
• Sabine Koch is Head of the Department of Learning, Informatics, Management and Ethics (LIME), at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm.
• Details on Mikael Hoffman's research can be found on his profile page on ResearchGate.
• Take a look at what’s in store for participants at the 24th Annual Meeting of ISoP in Cairo, on October 24–27, 2025.
• Visit the websites of the Drug Safety Research Unit (DSRU), ISoP, Centre Anti Poison et Pharmacovigilance du Maroc, and Uppsala Monitoring Centre, to find out more about their work.

Join the conversation on social media
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About UMC
Read more about Uppsala Monitoring Centre and how we work to advance medicines safety.

Spontaneous adverse event reporting from healthcare professionals and patients is a cornerstone in pharmacovigilance systems. Unfortunately, it is a well-known issue that only a fraction of events is reported. To further complicate matters, poor quality reports present a significant challenge for pharmacovigilance assessors. In Uganda, several new routes have been introduced to facilitate reporting for patients and healthcare professionals, including email, WhatsApp and the Med Safety smartphone app. Henry Zakumumpa is a researcher at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. He has recently performed a qualitative study to learn more about drivers and obstacles for quality in adverse event reporting from patients and healthcare professionals in Uganda. He joins the Drug Safety Matters studio to help us get a more nuanced picture of challenges and opportunities around the issue.

Tune in to find out:

• Why are HIV patients in Uganda reluctant to report adverse events to their healthcare providers?
• What are the challenges with reporting via WhatsApp?
• How can regulators and PV centres foster better quality in incoming adverse event reports?

Want to know more?

• Listen to Henry talk about the safety of HIV medications in this 2022 episode of Drug Safety Matters.
• Visit this CARTA (Consortium for Advanced Research Training in Africa) profile page to learn more about Henry’s research.
• Improving the spontaneous reporting of suspected adverse drug reactions: An overview of systematic reviews (British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, 2023)
• Improving adverse drug event reporting by healthcare professionals (Cochrane Database Systematic Review, 2024)

Join the conversation on social media
Follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, X, or Bluesky and share your thoughts about the show with the hashtag #DrugSafetyMatters.

Got a story to share?
We’re always looking for new content and interesting people to interview. If you have a great idea for a show, get in touch!

About UMC
Read more about Uppsala Monitoring Centre and how we work to advance medicines safety.

There are many reasons why use of medical products during pregnancy requires special attention. First and foremost, we want to be sure that the medicine is as safe as possible for both the pregnant person and the unborn child. Unfortunately, the safety profiles of medicines used in pregnancy are often incomplete, which makes it difficult for patients and healthcare professionals to make informed decisions.

The Research section at Uppsala Monitoring Centre has a team that is currently focussing their efforts on pregnancy-related pharmacovigilance (PV). In this episode, data scientists Sara Vidlin and Levente Papai, and senior pharmacovigilance scientist Lovisa Sandberg from this team, discuss complexities and challenges of pregnancy-related PV, and new solutions for addressing those challenges.

Tune in to find out

• Why is the world still behind when it comes to pregnancy-related PV?
• What are the challenges faced by PV assessors wanting to look at pregnancy cases?
• How can healthcare professionals, patients and carers help assessors overcome these challenges, when reporting pregnancy-related adverse drug events?
• How can the VigiBase pregnancy algorithm, and other algorithms, support the identification of pregnancy cases?

How to use the VigiBase pregnancy algorithm

• Users of VigiLyze and VigiBase Custom Searches can use the VigiBase pregnancy algorithm as a filter when performing searches.
• In the qualitative view in VigiLyze, click on “Filter” -> “Patient” -> “Pregnancy” to apply the filter.

Want to know more?

• Read about the VigiBase pregnancy algorithm in this Uppsala Reports article and in this poster, presented at the International Society of Pharmacoepidemiology (ISPE) 2024 annual meeting.
• EURAP – an international prospective observational study of pregnancies with antiepileptic drugs. EURAP - International Registry of Antiepileptic Drugs and Pregnancy
• The International Council for Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH) - E2B(R3) Individual Case Safety Report (ICSR) Specification and Related Files
• The IMI-concePTION project
• Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities (MedDRA) support documentation
• Zaccaria C, Piccolo L, Gordillo-Marañón M, et al. Identification of Pregnancy Adverse Drug Reactions in Pharmacovigilance Reporting Systems: A Novel Algorithm Developed in EudraVigilance. Drug Safety. 2024
• Sakai T, Mori C, Koshiba H, et al. Pregnancy Loss Signal from Prostaglandin Eye Drop Use in Preg

Join the conversation on social media
Follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, X, or Bluesky and share your thoughts about the show with the hashtag #DrugSafetyMatters.

Got a story to share?
We’re always looking for new content and interesting people to interview. If you have a great idea for a show, get in touch!

About UMC
Read more about Uppsala Monitoring Centre and how we work to advance medicines safety.