By Dear Well-wishers,
I am heartened to meet you through this February 2022 edition of Oviya MedSafe’s
newsletter (the 113th in the series since April 2012), with profuse gratitude to each one of you who expressed your warm wishes in response to our previous edition in which we announced that Oviya MedSafe which was founded on 14th March 2012 was soon to turn ten years old. What a treat it is to realize that we have so many people with so much goodwill for us!
Today, I tend to recall why I thought of founding an organization like Oviya MedSafe in the first place. While the passion I developed for Pharmacovigilance thanks to the exposure I had due to my prior employment with the industry is obviously the root cause, I now reflect upon why such a cause took root in me. Ever since I started working in global Pharmacovigilance units in 2007, I had some original thoughts about this field which I wished to express for the betterment of the discipline. However, I came to understand not only that my hypotheses needed to be corroborated by experience but also that my voice would be taken seriously only if I had a demonstrated professional calibre in Pharmacovigilance. And, for that, it needed to be my career too.
At this juncture, a natural question would arise: Why was entrepreneurship necessary to make this happen? It was simply because I was much more comfortable in knowingly taking the pain to carve my own path towards my faraway destination with reasonable certainty rather than trying to do my best for the cause without giving up the convenience of taking the conventional road which may have compromised the purpose itself. And, thus Oviya MedSafe was born!
Throughout the decade, Oviya MedSafe despite leaving no stone unturned to actively pursue Pharmacovigilance as a business, stood for enhancing the awareness, advocacy, appreciation, adherence and adoption of Pharmacovigilance by all stakeholders. I owe a lot to all of my team members, shareholders, board colleagues, and other interested parties who were so willing to support the cause that I always believed in that they ended up working hard to take the essence of ‘Drug Safety for Patient Safety’ to their networks too. Of course, I need to thank Oviya MedSafe’s clients and business collaborators located in different parts of the world for seeing this as an accolade instead of an obstacle. Serendipitously, several honorary leadership positions in many renowned professional associations subsequently came my way and my unbiased performances in those roles made sure the message reached far, wide and deep.
As a representative sample, I am glad to share with you the Activity Report of the Indian Medical Association (IMA) Headquarters Standing Committee for Pharmacovigilance of which I was the Chairman for the year 2021. With 5 webinars, 2 published articles, 2 conference talks, 3 stakeholder engagements, 1 recognition (in a World Health Organization publication) and 1 training session, the versatile portfolio of the committee for 2021 is unprecedented, for which I sincerely thank all the distinguished members of the committee and the IMA leadership whose involved support made this to be reality.
In fact, these were the thought processes going on in my mind when I named as “Pharmacovigilance: Of The Pill; For The People” the virtual colloquium which we conducted to begin the celebrations of our 10th anniversary. It is with utmost pleasure that I share with you the video recording of the event which was conducted as a Zoom webinar on 11-Mar-2022. Please click on the link https://youtu.be/dveQrSg4HQU to watch this video on our official YouTube channel to which I request you to subscribe with alerts so that you will receive notifications of our future videos as they get posted. As always, feedback is welcome.
Before concluding, I once again thank you for all the goodwill and seek your continued encouragement as we move into our second decade of life.
Waiting to greet you with our March 2022 newsletter soon,
With thanks & regards,
Dr J Vijay Venkatraman
MBBS, F. Diab., MBA, FPIPA (UK)
Managing Director & CEO,
Oviya MedSafe Pvt Ltd,
Coimbatore, India
Phone: +91 422 2444442
Director,
Oviya MedSafe UK Ltd,
London, UK
Phone: +44 20 3393 6037
Web: www.oviyamedsafe.com
Mail: info@oviyamedsafe.com
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