Grant: Team Grant: DSEN Collab. Centre for Prospective Studies - Active Surveillance

The debilitating and lethal consequences of severe adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are a striking failure of modern medicine. The consequences for patients who experience severe ADRs are catastrophic. In Canada, ADRs claim over 10,000 lives each year and cause many more life-long disabilities. To tackle this complex problem, rapid and efficient identification of potential drug risks is of utmost importance. A very efficient method to identify ADRs and evaluate the risks of a given drug for the Canadian population is active surveillance. Active surveillance means monitoring the use of drugs in patients by trained clinicians who have specific expertise in the recognition of ADRs. The overall goal is to identify ADRs and then reduce their occurrence in Canadians by better understanding in whom specific ADRs are most likely. This is the vision and prime motivation for the DSEN active Surveillance and Evaluation of Adverse Reactions in Canadian Healthcare (DSEN-SEARCH) Initiative. Our team will build on its broad experience in surveillance methods and its established network of ADR surveillance clinicians in Canadian health centres. These surveillance clinicians identify and report ADRs, and collect the detailed clinical information that is needed to evaluate potential drug risks. Personal identifiers are not included to protect patient privacy. We have already developed and use a clinical information system that ensures rapid reporting of ADRs from across Canada into a secure database for storage. This will allow DSEN-SEARCH to rapidly begin new surveillance in areas of importance to the CIHR Drug Safety and Effectiveness Network. The DSEN-SEARCH team of nationally recognized scientists will conduct research, train students and clinicians in best practices for active drug safety surveillance and ensure that research findings are made available to health professionals, patients, regulators and policy makers in order to improve patient drug safety in Canada.