The department also provides high quality services such as Pharmacovigilance, Drug information services and Substance of abuse testing services to St. John’s hospital to improve patient care. We are one of the pioneers to start these services in the country.

The St. John’s Pharmacovigilance program :

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) monitoring centre was started by the Department of Pharmacology at St. John’s Medical College in 1992. Later, it was recognized as one of the 13 national peripheral centers of ICMR in 1996. Pharmacovigilance is now mandatory for MCI and NABH accreditation. Currently the ADR Monitoring Centre (AMC) is a part of the Pharmacovigilance program of India (PvPI) and is an approved AMC by the ministry of health and family welfare. The aim of the program at St. John's is to capture all ADRs occurring in our hospital. The centre reports the ADRs received from health care professionals from St. John’s hospital and three other peripheral hospitals to the National centre in Ghaziabad under Ministry of health and family welfare.

A pharmacovigilance committee was constituted in 2011, as per the MCI requirements for teaching medical institutes. The members of this committee (Dean, Vice Dean, Chief of Medical Services, Chief of Nursing Services, HODs of the selected clinical departments, Pharmacology faculty) meet periodically to provide suggestions for the improvement of the activities of program.

The ongoing activities include spontaneous reporting, active surveillance in select departments and conduct of training and awareness sessions for the health care professionals to enhance ADR reporting. We have reported 705 ADRs to the national program during last one year. Some of the recently started key activities to improve the program include installation of 48 ADR drop boxes at the OPD and IP wards to improve spontaneous reporting; selection and training of 60 link nurses in our hospital to increase awareness; provision of coloured ADR notification stickers at the nursing stations to stick to the case files of patients with ADRs and circulation of drug alerts and newsletters to health care professionals.

Drug Information Services :

The Drug Information Centre (DIC) at the Department of Pharmacology, was restarted on the 1st of Feb, 2011. Our Drug Information Centre works towards the promotion of safe, effective, rational and economic use of drugs by the health professionals and patients. Its important roles include provision of specialised information to clinical departments pertaining to aspects of patient management and treatment like dosage schedule, choice of drugs, suggestions for alternatives in certain clinical scenarios as well as management of ADRs.

The DIC also plays an important role in the drugs and therapeutic committee of the hospital, ensuring the availability of evidence-based drugs in a teaching and tertiary care hospital like ours.

Substance of Abuse test :

The department of Pharmacology has been conducting test for Substances of Abuse since 2004. These tests are qualitative immuno-chromatographic assay tests to detect substances of abuse in urine. We conduct tests for Marijuana, Benzodiazepines, Morphine, Phencyclidine, Methamphetamine, Cocaine and Amphetamine. The samples that we receive for testing are mainly from Departments of psychiatry and emergency. We also receive samples from hospitals in and around Koramangala. The number of samples has increased over the years and in the last one year (2016-17), we have conducted 749 tests. These tests aid the physicians to identify the presence or absence of a specific substance of abuse and thus aids in their management.