This is the webpage and blog of Anthony R Cox, which is mainly concerned with issues around drug safety, pharmacovigilance, and the use of medicines.
I am pleased to annouce the publication of a new textbook ‘Principles and Practice of Pharmacovigilance and Drug Safety’. It is an edited volume with over 50 expert authors with an international reach, with each chapter peer-reviewed. The science of drug safety and pharmacovigilance has rapidly evolved in the 21st century. The knowledge and principles it contains are of increasing importance in…
Yet again, a new phase of the pandemic in the UK. First there was the prodrome of general awareness of a new virus in China, with the uncertainties, and false re-assurances, evaporating away to leave the reality of the first wave. Deaths. Lockdowns. New uncertainties. How does it spread? Should I wash my shopping? Should we wear masks? The answer to the latter I found was no — I was refused access…
I recently appeared on the Uppsala Monitoring Centre podcast Drug Safety Matters on the subject of talking about vaccine safety. With vaccine hesitancy on the rise and misinformation spreading like wildfire on social media, drug safety specialists may have a hard time knowing how to talk about side effects without affecting people’s trust in vaccinations. Anthony Cox from the University of…
Just a short post linking to an article about communicating vaccine safety, which I contributed to, at Uppsala Reports. Here is an excerpt. We can’t allow bad actors to damage the drive for openness in research and data,” Cox says. Science is about finding the closest approximation to the truth, he explains, and it is essential that we have open discussions about what that is. Trying to control,…
The arrival of effective vaccines against COVID-19 has been one of the few good news stories of the pandemic. However, communicating the safety of vaccines has long been difficult, as shown by most countries having some level of vaccine hesitancy, including hesitancy towards COVID-19 vaccines specifically. Just as regulatory authorities – such as the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the UK’s…
A few years ago I set up a small group teaching session for pharmacy students based around a fatal adverse drug reaction, using a video developed by the World Health Organisation. This year it is an inter-professional education event run by pharmacy and nursing academics. Sadly it will be taking place over Zoom, rather in the building you can see above, but that has made timetabling an…
Our research group has a new paper (Open Access) looking at the experiences of multi-professional prescribers using an electronic prescribing system. We suspected some differences between the professional groups (nurses, pharmacists, and doctors), but they all reported similar experiences. The pharmacists had some differing perspectives because of their monitoring role in prescribing, but their…
Over the past year I’ve been working on a Special Edition of the International Journal of Pharmacy Practice on focused on medication safety with some colleagues from Cardiff University. It’s been a long haul, but we have just got it out for medication safety week 2020. It has been an interesting process of filtering and reviewing papers, but I think we have an interesting mix of papers, that fit…
It’s Medicines Safety week. The twitter hashtag #medsafetyweek shows a lot of international activity to encourage awareness of the harms of medicines, with a special emphasis on the importance of everybody playing their part in reporting suspected side effects of medicines. Every report counts. The MHRA’s Yellow Card Scheme has been established since 1964 and has just reached the milestone of…
It’s patient safety day. If you go to twitter and look at the hashtag #WorldPatientSafetyDay there’s lots of interesting and valuable material that can be used to make healthcare a safer place for both patients and healthcare staff. But there is one easy small thing you can do to have huge impact. This year make a commitment to spend 5 minutes on one thing that adds to global patient safety. You…