Post-marketing surveillance in New Zealand

In early 1977, the Intensive Medicines Monitoring Programme (IMP) was instigated for selected medicines with novel chemistry or pharmacology and those expected to be widely used. Pharmacists are requested to record the patient and prescribing doctor's details along with the medicine dose and duration of the prescription. Doctors are asked to send details of any unexpected clinical events. Doctors' spontaneous returns are low and have been supplemented by regular surveys. Now a new self-carboned prescription form has recently been introduced upon which doctors indicate if events have occurred. Since trial introduction of the new system the rate of event reporting in the test areas has increased 15-fold. In view of this, the duplicate prescription system will be introduced to the whole country over the next 3 years. In the past, the IMP has been used to follow up signals of new adverse events, to establish adverse drug reaction profiles and to establish risk-benefit indications.