Impact Assessments and Risk Management for Change Control

Overview:

Having a robust process to do an impact assessment of changes is critical to the change control process. In this webinar, we will explore and discuss methods to put systems in place to ensure that all changes that require impact assessments are appropriately assessed and impact addressed. The relevant regulatory topics will be addressed as well as ways to introduce a more robust process into your workflow.

Why you should Attend:

An all  too common observation during a regulatory audit or during a product nonconformance investigation is that changes were made to the product through the product documentation that were actually harmful to the product performance or that proper studies were not undertaken to ensure the product continued to meet design goals. Another consequence of an inadequate change control strategy is when making changes to one product adversely impacts another product or multiple products. 

Areas Covered in the Session:

• Impact assessment as a part of change control
  • The ability to assess the impact of a change is integral to the process of change control
  • Must be an integral part of your change control procedure
  • Not an option
• Why do an impact assessment as part of change control?
  • Regulatory guidance talks to ensuring all changes are reviewed, verified and/or validated as appropriate
  • Determination of “appropriate” is a little vague. 
  • Regulatory guidance does not provide much guidance on how to do an impact assessment
  • The process and procedure must be part of internal SOPs
• Quick review of the elements of a change description
  • The change
  • The reason
  • The justification
    • The justification comes from the impact assessment
    • You can’t justify the change without assessing the impact of the change first
• Low impact changes
  • Not all changes require a comprehensive impact assessment
  • There should be a predefined list of changes or change types that do not require a full impact assessment to justify
  • This list of changes or change types should be part of an SOP and fairly short and well defined
• Impact assessment team
  • If it is determined that a full impact assessment is needed a team to do the assessment should be put together
  • Can be permanent group or put together as needed
  • Need someone to drive the change
    • Acts as the project manager for the change
  • Other functional areas depending on the nature of the change
  • Creating a change control roadmap
  • The use of forms and decision trees is essential to success
  • Team needs to have guidance and a place to record impact decisions
  • Examples of decision tree and change impact assessment form
  • Understanding of risk management impact
    • Simple tool for risk management during change control
  • Understanding regulatory impact
  • Conclusions and questions

Who Will Benefit:

The following professionals in the Pharmaceutical, Medical Device, or Combination Product industries with responsibilities in the following areas:

• Quality Systems
• Quality Assurance
• Quality Control
• Change Control
• Engineering/R&D
• Regulatory Affairs
• Manufacturing