Nineteen specialists from Ethiopia’s Food and Drug Authority took part in a four-day workshop in July to learn how to better track and analyze the safety of medicines and vaccines. The training, part of the Global One Health Summer Institute, was organized by the Global One Health initiative and the EFDA.
The workshop focused on helping attendees learn more about detecting, assessing, understanding and preventing the adverse effects of medicines and vaccines. The goal of the training was to help local experts use information more effectively when making regulatory decisions about medicines and public health.
Participants gained both theoretical knowledge and practical skills essential for effectively managing and analyzing pharmacovigilance data with a focus on leveraging the power of “R”, a widely used open-source statistical software. Key topics included: data cleaning, transformation and management techniques; exploratory data analysis for pharmacovigilance datasets; data visualization, emphasizing how to communicate findings effectively; introduction to statistical modeling techniques relevant to pharmacovigilance, including binary and time-to-event outcomes.
This training is part of a broader Global One Health agenda to build local expertise in data-driven decision-making and foster sustainable public health systems in collaboration with national and international partners.