Day 2 (Medical Affairs + Pharmacovigilance)

Alright! Day 2…

Early morning office

Pantry-Way to kick start our day

Today’s scope was dealing with the medical affairs department as well as the pharmacovigilance department.

The medical affairs (MA) department consists of doctors, pharmacists and science-related background graduates in the medical field. As pharmacist graduates, we can pursue this area which deals a lot with understanding the scientific aspect of the products. They say pharmacists are the expert in drugs. Very true! Product specialist, marketing associates, even doctors will consult your opinion and advice on the use of these products. One part of the job here is handling queries by doctors or pharmacists about the products they bought from your company. And online private databases are provided by the company for the MA dept to research on the latest findings and efficacy test etc. It is also part of the MA role to discuss and share with practitioners about recent findings and studies as practitioners need to attend to large queues of patients and hardly have much time to read up. The MA people also conduct educational talks for practitioners and other healthcare professional to attend and update themselves. Some events also award CME (continuing medical education) points, which is something like CPD. And for pharmacists in Malaysia to renew their license, they must collect 30 points per year, with about 2 points from each event. Imagine the number of events to clock up per year!

The main point is, MA people play very vital roles in educating the society, whether it is for the public audience, or the healthcare professionals. Although they aren’t licensed to prescribe medicine to patients, they do heavily influence how patients are treated. They also interact a lot with Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs), such as famous specialist and high-ranking practitioners, as they are the ones that tell their fellow peers (through conferences or symposiums) what are the best choices for the patients. Of course there are codes of conduct such as the PhAMA code which regulates and ensures that all these educational events are not for promotional purposes.

Which brings us to the other thing we learnt in the morning----the PhAMA code. You can easily search it up. Why PhAMA code is so important is because as MA associates, you need to know all these by heart, and makes sure that the company adhere to all of the codes. Simple stuff such as the banning from the using of superlative words on products, such as “THE BEST” or “THE SAFEST” drug in the country. All these, although minute, are very important and the MA associates are in the best position to assist the company in these aspects.

In the afternoon, Ms. Rosalind from the pharmacovigillance (PV) department discussed with us about this new and bombastic jargon. In the earlier years, reports of adverse events (AE) and adverse drug reactions (ADR) of products are received and processed by staffs, with the workload shared among departments. However, with the expansion of product portfolio and tightening of ethical codes, there is a need for a department which mainly deals with these aspects. The PV department handles complains handed in by sales reps or the customers themselves (practitioners who sells medicines from MSD) regarding adverse side effects experienced by patients and channels them to the HQ. The department also ensures that the safety and efficacy of the products are maintained, and that any defects of batches will be addressed promptly.

Snacks from Ms Rosalind- As sweet as her

To add on, we were also given an article on recent drug development to summarize on, something like our assignment we had. This time, we’ll be mentored on how to do it soon this week, and hopefully can share with you all too!