Currently, the overall quality of the pharmacovigilance systems in the health care industry has been rapidly growing in the country. There is retain-only competition amongst the pharmaceutical companies today, as each of them is developing some very innovative medical products.
Hence, this makes it essential to train the workforce for different pharmacovigilance aspects and affairs related to drug regulations.
Trained professionals who practice pharmacovigilance are offered handsome packages. There is a whole new increasing demand in the pharma industry, making it certain for individuals to have a good career prospect. Plenty of challenging roles with lucrative rewards are now open to candidates in many pharmaceutical companies.
The regulatory and drug safety companies face very high-volume work, ensuring an increased career development in pharmacovigilance.
Various Roles in Pharmacovigilance Jobs
As a PV scientist, your role is to detect, evaluate, medical products and predict some adverse effects of drugs. You also have to play a crucial role in understanding the risk or benefits to ensure that the medicines are safe to consume. The safety cases come from various clinical trials and drugs being marketed. You need to complete some gaps.
The initial salary is mainly based on your academic background, which varies from one company to company. Drug Safety Associate or Drug Safety Coordinator is the starting title you can avail of under the job. Under this, you need to focus on case processing that includes data entry cases and ensuring drug identifiers are correctly captured. You need to call the evaluator to decide on the adverse event's cause.
You can be a pro at narrative report writing once you have achieved two-three years of experience in the industry. Once you have good narrative writing skills, you can step further into reviewing and authoring Periodic Safety Update Reports. Besides that, you can explore several roles, including drug safety medical writer or aggregate report writer. You can also become a team leader or even a manager with six to eight years of experience in the industry.
Why is Pharmacovigilance a great career option?
Pharmacovigilance (PV) or drug safety is one of the most vital aspects of assessing perks or risks of the different pharma products, and of course, it confirms their safety.
The primary science that goes into it is monitoring, investigating, obtaining, and assessing the information collected from various healthcare providers or companies. You can also collect data from individuals who have suffered the side effects of the company's drugs.
Above all, we can say that Pharmacovigilance (PV) is one of the best career options for medical, pharmacy, and life science graduates.
If you're good with number games, statistics and enjoy managing a big chunk of data gathering, segregating, and taking something meaningful out of it, then PV is meant for you.
The PV experts help ensure that the drugs on the shelf in the market are safe and the ones termed dangerous are removed from the frame with immediate effect.
The Industry's Working
There are huge organizations related to this field, and different sites have different teams. If you have minimum technical exposure, then there are chances you would be working in isolated departments with senior staff dictation, and risk management staff would be there too.
You need to know that PV doesn't claim to offer any management authority. Instead, it would help if you worked hard here to prove your caliber. The job is quite challenging, so to make the most of it, you need to be intellectual, unexpected, and challenging at the same time.
4 Tips for Pursuing Pharmacovigilance as a Career
- When you join PV as a career, you need to consider several areas. If you are looking for specialized jobs, you should be ready to join jobs including Statisticians, IT, and Computer experts besides Epidemiologists. Hence you need to ensure that you are interested in these jobs before entering the field.
- If you have a standard degree, you need to know that you cannot jump into this field. It is mainly because you need to have relevant education in pharmacy, medical, or life science to join the area. You can avail several opportunities if you have high educational qualities. MD, DO, RPh, PharmD, RN, LPN, Ph.D., MS, BS, IT, etc., are known to be the highest degrees available here.
- Almost all the experts or companies look for experienced candidates as PV is a complex field. You need to ensure that you hold sufficient experience if you want to crack through your dream company. You might have the upper hand during the interview process if you have the required experience.
- When you work in PV, you can expect some fantastic prospects your way. Hence it would help if you considered gaining as much knowledge as possible.
Barriers to Break for a Career Progression
When you are placed in a technical position, it can get challenging to get the right job, primarily due to a lack of experience in that particular role. But when looking for a job, always have in mind that you look for long-term opportunities. Smaller firms expose to a broad scope of tasks to push your limit. With the right experience and technical knowledge, you can reach up the ladder within a few years.
You need to be quite attentive if you are in the PV department. It means minute details cannot be ignored while evaluating risks and other factors of different drugs that people use out there—being an expert, you need to be quite precise besides being productive.