Strategies and interventions to strengthen pharmacovigilance systems in low- and middle-income countries: A scoping review

Objectives
The slow progress of pharmacovigilance (PV) in low-and-middle-income countries (LMIC) raises questions about core challenges on the growth of PV, and the appropriateness of strategies used so far to develop PV. Therefore, this scoping review aims to describe strategies and interventions to strengthen PV in LMIC and to propose recommendations for future investments in PV capacity building.
 
Inclusion criteria
Publications included were primary studies, articles, and policy and guideline papers, describing interventions to strengthen PV in LMIC. 
 
Methods
The review was conducted following the Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) guidelines on conducting scoping reviews. Literature searches were performed in MEDLINE, EMBASE, Web of Science, PDQ-evidence, CINAHL and relevant websites from 1990 to January 2021. Two reviewers independently screened titles, abstracts and full-texts. One reviewer performed data extraction and descriptive analysis, which were reviewed by two other reviewe..., This scoping review included primary research, both qualitative and quantitative, that described interventions or strategies to strengthen pharmacovigilance (PV) capacity, as well as policy and guideline papers from national regulatory authorities (NRA). An initial limited search of MEDLINE, EMBASE, Epistemonikos, Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) Database of Systematic Reviews and Implementation Reports and Web of Science was undertaken to identify articles of interest. This search strategy was defined in MEDLINE and was adapted for each database above using the Polyglot Search Translator. The search was performed on 25 Jan 2021 in the following databases: Ovid Medline, Ovid Embase, CINAHL via Ebsco, Web of Science core Collection, PDQ Evidence. Sources of grey literature included Google Scholar, websites of technical agencies such as WHO, and websites of selected NRA. A simpler search strategy was defined.
Identified citations from the searches were collated and uploaded into EndNote X9.3...,