test nitharna
Help Us Raise Awareness
You can help us raise awareness about the importance of reporting suspected side effects using the Yellow Card Scheme and encourage others to report a Yellow Card using the animations, gifs and video materials below. You can help by sharing them on social media, or you can download them and save them to upload on social media, or for local promotion.
Please contact us if you would like more information about the Yellow Card Scheme to help us raise awareness, or you wish to add information to your website or intranet, or to receive paper Yellow Card reporting forms for healthcare professionals or patients. Yellow Card forms are available which you can download and print from the downloads section of this website.
Below is an animated video developed by the MHRA to promote the reporting of suspected side effects. It can also be seen on MHRA's YouTube channel.
Feel free to share and like the animation on social media.
Did you know that the above video can be downloaded here and added to patient waiting room television screens? Help us widen the use of this animation and reach as many patients as possible to help raise awareness about Yellow Card reporting. You can do this by speaking to your local GP practice or letting the person in charge of the patient waiting area, usually by speaking to the person at reception, know about accessing this link so they can get this added and shown to patients to encourage Yellow Card reporting of suspected side effects to medicines.
The animation above and three infographics below were developed by the MHRA as an output from the SCOPE (Strengthening Collaborations to Operate Pharmacovigilance in Europe) Joint Action project. These were then used to establish the first European wide social media campaign that was led by the MHRA in 2016.
Building upon this momentum, the MHRA contacted and collaborated with the Uppsala Monitoring Centre, a World Health Organisation Collaborating Centre for International Drug Monitoring, to develop more animations for a subsequent social media campaign the following year. This has now grown into an annual social media campaign where medicines regulators and pharmacovigilance centres across the globe participate in a joint effort to raise awareness and encourage the reporting of suspected adverse drug reactions, commonly called side effects, to national reporting systems, such as the Yellow Card Scheme in the UK. The annual social media campaign is now called ‘#MedSafetyWeek’.
Each year, the social media campaigns aim to increase general awareness and encourage reporting of suspected side effects to the Yellow Card Scheme and in addition, there is usually a specific theme. Here are some examples below:
The 2017 campaign theme focused on the importance of reporting suspected side effects with over-the-counter medicines; however, the message is applicable to all medicines.
The 2018 campaign theme focused on the importance of reporting suspected side effects and the safe use of medicines in babies, children, and pregnant and breastfeeding women.
From 17-23 February 2020, following on from the 2019 MedSafetyWeek, the MHRA is running its next social media campaign to raise awareness that patients, carers, parents, and healthcare professionals can report suspected side effects to the Yellow Card Scheme, especially when using or giving multiple medicines (polypharmacy).
How you can support the Yellow Card Scheme:
- If you don't already, follow us on our social media channels:
- Twitter (@MHRAgovuk and @MHRAmedicines)
- Over the course of the week (or at any time afterwards), please retweet, like and share MHRA posts on social media which will contain links to the animations and infographics.
- Send your own messages out on your social media channels using the animations or your own, bringing your followers’ attention to the campaign.
- Encourage healthcare professionals, patients, carers and parents that they can report side effects themselves online at www.mhra.gov.uk/yellowcard or using the Yellow Card app.
- Consider contributing your own perspective and thoughts to the discussion using the #patientsafety #polypharmacy #yellowcard
- Tell your colleagues and stakeholders about the campaign and ask them to support it by sharing/retweeting the links to the animation and infographics via their organisational, personal Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts as well as via professional networks.
MHRA has developed other videos through national campaigns aimed to encourage the reporting of suspected side effects which you can see on the Yellow Card MHRA YouTube channel:
