The Parenteral Drug Association (PDA) and the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering (ISPE) have announced the joint publication of a guide for Root Cause Analysis (RCA). The guide aims to help the pharmaceutical industry improve quality culture by providing recommendations for tools, techniques, and processes.
The organisations also announced that they have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) confirming their plans to continue to advance practical approaches for quality culture.
The first product of this collaboration is the RCA guide, which will assist the pharmaceutical industry in evolving and identifying best practices, tools and appropriate references for root cause analysis. The MOU leaves open the possibility that the organisations could directly collaborate on additional topics in the future.
The organisations selected RCA as the first topic in this undertaking as root cause analysis forms a significant part of any organisation's continuous improvement programme. The lack of rigour applied to identifying the true root cause of failure events often leads to situations where the causal factors or effects of a given failure are identified and corrected, rather than the underlying cause. These symptoms of failure are often more visible and easily reported, while the actual root cause(s) of the problem may go unaddressed. This practical guide identifies a range of RCA tools along with recommendations for their application in the search for true root cause.