By Winnie Chebiwot Kipchumba
A patient starts a new medicine at a health facility and returns home. Two days later, she develops severe dizziness and a rash. She is unsure whether the medicine is responsible. The facility may be kilometres away.
She does not know whether what she is experiencing should be reported, whom she should tell or whether her concern is serious enough to matter. So, she tells her family, perhaps a neighbor. But the health system may never hear about it.
For pharmacovigilance, that silence matters. Kenya, like many African countries, has made important progress in establishing pharmacovigilance systems and digital reporting mechanism for adverse drug reaction, medication errors, vaccine related events, and poor-quality products. But having a pharmacovigilance system is not the same as having a patient accessible safety system.
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