GMP Work Experience Assessment.

Testing standards for persons employed in cGMP validation tasks.

The number of regulatory citations for training; or rather lack of cGMP training, is ever increasing.  Also there is an increase in the number of citations for persons not having adequate documented proof that they are actually competant for the tasks they are being ask to execute.

Even in house staff have been challenged by visiting regulators.  A recent citation claimed that a QA manager; although adequately qualified, did not have any documented prove of actual validation practices experience.  The regulators are also keen to have the competancy of agency staff verified.  During a regulatory review of protocols they expressed surprise that the QA manager had not taken any action to verify the CV’s of agency staff.      

This is a problem we are all well aware of.  Who checks out agency staff CV’s?  Certainly it is not the agencies that refer them, they could never justify the cost of retaining qualified and experienced staff to vet and verify the experience and qualifications for all the disciplins they recruit for.  Large companies probably do have the staff, but not the time for such activities.  Smaller companies generally use agency staff because they lack this skill set.

Validation Online is currently writing a pool of questions covering all aspects of validation.  These will be built into a multiple choice question paper.  The question pool initially will be circa 400 and the test paper will contain 50 questions.  It is intended to ensure that a qualified competant  multi-disiplined person should be able to score in the region of the high 80’s.  With lessor skill sets scoring accordingly.

We see this as being an excellent tool for the validation manager to assess their own staff or potential staff and to set an acceptance level for agency staff, while establishing records of staff competance. If you could be kind enough to submit your comments in the form below; It would greatly appreciated.

Combination IQ/OQ/PQ Protocol.
This combination protocol has been produced in response to several hundred reader suggestions we received in our - Suggestions Section. It has been carefully designed to make it the preferred choice for Process and Laboratory stand-alone equipment. It is an interactive, fully detailed, sixty three page protocol that runs to approximately seven thousand words. It is presented in 'MS Word' to facilitate ease of final editing by the end user. It has become a very popular document.