Journal of Pharmacy Practice and Education

Pharmacovigilance (PV or PhV), is also known as drug safety, is the pharmacological science which relates to the collection, detection, assessment, monitoring, and prevention of adverse effects with pharmaceutical products. The roots for the word are "pharmacovigilance" are: pharmakon (Greek for drug) and vigilare (Latin for to keep watch). As such, pharmacovigilance heavily focuses on adverse drug reactions, or ADRs, which are defined as any response to a drug which is noxious and unintended, including lack of efficacy.