Managing Your FDA Inspection: Before, During and After

FDA conducts inspections based on well established procedures. You can lower your anxiety level when you can predict what they will do during an inspection, what products they cover and how they will document your problems. Any type of regulated firm should the ground rules of an inspection to keep it under control. You should be able to see the hand writing on the wall if it looks bad and prepare accordingly. You should understand what is at stake based on the progress of an inspection. How you respond to an investigator, to the inspection in general and to the FDA can seal your fate to an unhappy ending if you don’t know what to do, how to do it and how fast you need to do it. Questions are encouraged. What did you want to know about FDA, but were always afraid to ask? What are the big mistakes firms make? Here the firsthand accounts of an ex-FDA investigator.

Learning Objectives:

Who will Benefit:

When you interact with the FDA, you need to look at yourself through FDA’s eyes. You can understand the purpose of an inspection, what the investigator will do and what it means for you. Once you learn how to read the signals you are better equipped to mitigate regulatory damage and, best of all, take the drama and mystique out of an inspection. The information in the course gives you rational and comprehensive approach so you do not feel like a deer staring at the headlights. If you know what the investigator is doing and you understand your job, your receptionist will not need a panic button.

• Regulatory Affairs Directors
• Quality Assurance Managers
• Quality Control Managers
• Manufacturing Directors and Managers
• Product Risk Managers
• Venture Capitalists

Topic Background:

FDA inspections can have a big impact on a firm’s budget, public image, customers, employees and stockholders. No one wants the bad news that the FDA investigator puts on a written list of observations, aka the “483.” Your 483 is like a report card that your teacher shows to everyone else in the class. What an investigator finds pulls together many different legal, administrative and technical factors that end up showing you and the public where you stand with the FDA. Inspections cover a wide range of products and an equally broad range of establishments, so preparing for and understanding an inspection takes work that is specific to your firm.

FDA inspections are assigned for many different reasons. Safety (risk to health) plays a major role in how FDA selects firms for inspections. Firms can estimate their likely risk status in terms of FDA’s regulatory interest. Once a firm is selected for inspection, how the inspection is conducted becomes a make-or-break situation. Inspections are designed to find problems. They are inherently uncomfortable for the people who host the investigator during the inspection. Predicting what an investigator will do during an inspection becomes helpful in how you manage a difficult situation to avoid a potentially disastrous and costly result.