The Iraqi Pharmacovigilance Centre (IPvC): Structure and Reporting Flow

1. Key takeaways

The Iraqi Pharmacovigilance Centre (IPvC) is the only official body at the Iraqi federal level carrying post-marketing vigilance functions. It belongs to the Pharmacy Department of the Directorate of Technical Affairs of the Ministry of Health and has been a member of the World Health Organization International Drug Monitoring Programme since 2010. It maintains a regional centre in every provincial health directorate, and every public hospital designates a hospital safety officer (usually a pharmacist), who reports to the regional centre on paper forms; the data are processed at the regional centre in the VigiFlow system and forwarded to the national centre. In different documents the centre appears under three abbreviations — IPvC, IPC, IPhvcC — which refer to one and the same body and must be normalised by the reader at first encounter. The above comes from the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal, 2021, volume 27, issue 10, pages 1007–1015; the second author is the head of the centre.

• One national centre, a regional centre per provincial health directorate, a safety officer in each public hospital.
• Initial reports are paper forms; digitisation happens at the regional centre in VigiFlow.
• Member of the WHO International Drug Monitoring Programme since 2010.
• IPvC, IPC and IPhvcC are three spellings of the same institution.

2. Legal basis

Source level: primary source, verified. — The full-text PDF on the WHO official domain was downloaded and checked. The article is a journal publication, a factual basis, not a legal source; Article 105 of the Public Health Law only shows that the Ministry of Health is empowered to issue subordinate documents, and the code itself mentions no vigilance centre. The IPvC is an administrative establishment: as of the verification date of 2026-10-29, no legal provision founding it was found in any legally reachable official source; because the Ministry of Health website and the official legal databases were unreachable, its non-existence cannot be asserted either.

Excerpts from the source:

• Affiliation: the Iraqi Pharmacovigilance Centre assures post-marketing medication safety; the centre is part of the Pharmacy Department of the Directorate of Technical Affairs and has been a member of the WHO International Drug Monitoring Programme since 2010.
• Organisation and data flow: the centre has a regional centre in each health directorate and a person responsible for hospital safety (usually a pharmacist) at each public hospital, who reports any adverse drug reactions using a paper-based form to the regional centre, where the data are processed using the VigiFlow system.
• Joining the WHO surveillance system for substandard and falsified medicines: in 2013 the Iraqi health ministry became a member of the WHO Global Surveillance and Monitoring System for substandard and falsified medications; on 15 September 2020 the health ministry submitted its first alert.

3. Expert insights

Insight 1 | This article carries more weight than any consultancy publication because the regulator wrote it itself. The affiliation of the second author, Manal Mohammed Younus, is given directly as Ministry of Health, Iraqi Pharmacovigilance Center — the head of the centre. In other words, every statement below about what the Iraqi vigilance system looks like comes from the operator of that system, not from outside second-hand inference. When GRZAN verifies the vigilance system of any country, it gives first priority to whether an operator-signed first-hand review exists.

Insight 2 | Digitisation happens at the regional centre, not at the desks of doctors and pharmacists. The three-tier structure runs from hospital safety officer to provincial regional centre to national centre, but the initial carrier of a report is a paper form, and the VigiFlow entry step sits at the regional centre. This arrangement determines two things: first, under-reporting occurs mainly at the hospital end, because the paper form depends on the pharmacist taking the initiative; second, the data seen by the national centre have already passed one manual transcription, with the timestamp keyed to the date of entry rather than the date of the event. When judging whether an event has been officially recorded in Iraq, companies must take this lag into account.

Insight 3 | Horizontal comparison: China splits drug and device vigilance into two systems; Iraq has one system and it covers medicines only. On the China side, the national adverse drug reaction monitoring system runs in parallel with the medical device adverse event monitoring information system, with different report formats, different reporters and different administrators for the two product classes. Iraq has a single centre sitting under the Pharmacy Department, and the WHO International Drug Monitoring Programme it joined, together with the VigiBase dataset of the UMC, is itself built around medicines and vaccines. This structural fact is the premise of the conclusion that article 47 of this series develops.

Insight 4 | Three coexisting abbreviations are the easiest identification trap. The same institution is called IPvC in the 2024 guidelines for healthcare professionals, IPC in the MAH Good Pharmacovigilance Practice Guideline, and IPhvC in earlier Iraqi local literature. First-time searchers often conclude that Iraq has several vigilance bodies, or the mixed spellings create client confusion. This series uniformly uses the Iraqi Pharmacovigilance Centre (IPvC) and notes, at first occurrence, that the three abbreviations denote the same body.

Insight 5 | Quantitative data convey the operating intensity of this system. The paper gives: sampling volumes of the National Medicines (Quality) Control Laboratory of 15,843 samples in 2017, 17,087 in 2018 and 19,388 in 2019; 2019 Ministry of Health data showing that 60–70% of private-sector medicines were neither registered nor quality-tested; and the Iraqi state company KIMADIA procuring 60% of essential medicines in 2019. Together these figures show that post-market control in Iraq rests mainly on large-scale sampling and on-site inspection.

4. Practical recommendations

• GRZAN uniformly uses the Iraqi Pharmacovigilance Centre (IPvC) in internal documents and external presentations, noting at first occurrence that IPC and IPhvcC are different abbreviations for the same body.
• Where a client runs both medicines and medical devices in Iraq, the two lines must be kept clearly apart: on the medicines side the counterpart is the IPvC; on the devices side there is no corresponding official counterpart body. Practical estimate: device-side quality information is recommended to be communicated through the existing Scientific Bureau channel (no official provision found).
• Subscribe to the alert publications of the Iraqi Pharmacists Syndicate website and its official Facebook page. These are the two channels through which the IPvC distributes substandard and falsified medicine alerts to the private sector, and an entry point never mentioned in Chinese-language material.
• For projects supplying public hospitals, treat the hospital safety officer as a contact who must be known, and have that officer initiate the paper reporting process inside the hospital.

5. Verification checklist

• □ Download the PDF from applications.emro.who.int and check the volume, issue and pages 2021;27(10):1007–1015 and the DOI 10.26719/emhj.21.025.
• □ Check that the affiliation of the second author is Ministry of Health, Iraqi Pharmacovigilance Center.
• □ Re-check the original wording on the Pharmacy Department of the Directorate of Technical Affairs and on membership of the WHO International Drug Monitoring Programme since 2010.
• □ Search using the three abbreviations IPC, IPvC and IPhvcC separately and confirm they point to one body, not to different bodies.
• □ Search the alert sections of the Iraqi Pharmacists Syndicate website and official accounts, and archive screenshots and links.
• □ Check whether an updated Iraq Pharmaceutical Country Profile or a new system review has appeared after the WHO article.
• □ Re-check whether the official documents cited in this article have been replaced by later directives or resolutions (verification baseline of this article: 29 October 2026).

Regulatory information verified to 29 October 2026.

How GRZAN can help. GRZAN provides medical device and IVD registration, quality system, authorised representative and local testing support for the Iraqi market. Our team manages adverse event reporting and recall coordination, and supports post-market vigilance obligations. Business enquiries: info@grzanglobal.com