Since about 2017, the Uppsala Monitoring Centre (UMC) has dedicated one week a year to raising awareness of medicine safety on social media. Each year, the center chooses a topic on which the awareness campaign will focus.

The campaign includes raising awareness among patients and the public to encourage them to understand the proper ways to use medications and to report the side effects that medications may cause.

The campaign will also benefit the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare professionals by increasing their awareness of pharmacovigilance systems and helping them educate their patients and the public.

The Uppsala Monitoring Centre has created a hashtag for this campaign, #MedSafetyWeek, which stands for Medicine Safety Week.

The theme of this year’s awareness campaign week, which kicks off from November 4 to 10, is “the importance of using medicines in the right way to prevent side effects and to report side effects when they do occur.” The campaign’s motto is “Preventing side effects.”

According to the Paul-Ehrlich-Institut (PEI), the Federal Institute for Vaccines and Biomedicines in Germany, 104 organizations from 91 countries are participating in this year’s campaign, including some Arab countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon.

Everyone can participate in this campaign to spread the message on their social media accounts.

I was very sorry when I visited the campaign’s resource page on the UK Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency‘s Yellow Card website, where there is a link to a page titled “Information in other languages and translation services.“

The Arabic language page has a translation in Urdu. Foreigners often confuse Persian or Urdu with Arabic, which could be due to other issues. I contacted the agency to clarify this error but have not received a response yet.

I mentioned this case to point out that raising awareness of these health and safety issues must be in the language of those you educate. How many Arabs in Britain have been deprived of reading this information about drug safety in their Arabic language?!

It is impossible to deny the role of the native medical and pharma translation services provider in the target language. The public, I mean those not specialized in the medical or pharma field, even if they are educated, needs to be informed about the medicine and its side effects in their mother tongue so that their hearts can be reassured when seeking treatment.

Based on Ali Saad Arabic Medical and Pharmaceutical Translation Services‘ vital role in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry, we had to introduce this campaign in Arabic to educate Arabic speakers about the necessity of reporting medication side effects to preserve their safety.

Do you want to participate in this campaign in Arabic? We have prepared an Arabic version of the 7 sample posts prepared by UMC to download to share a post every day on your social media profiles👇.