Because it's not usually the training, it's the trainee not absorbing the information or understanding the severity of it. I have had great success with "You are being given opportunity to absorb this information again because it was made evident you didn't understand it the first time you were instructed on X.XX.XXX. Do not hesitate to ask questions if you do not completely understand all information presented, as (not following X GMP, not filling out X documentation, etc) will result in disciplinary action up to possible termination."
I don't know what kind of folks you guys are getting over in the EU, but yeah..retraining is pretty essential here stateside from time to time.
I raise it because, in my experience, the training is rarely the issue.
People often use it as a CAPA action to create a paper trail so that they can discipline the person later, not because it's genuinely effective. What I like to see on CAPAs is a real interrogation into why the behaviour was wrong. What you tend to find it it's rarely that the employee didn't know what to do, but they didn't follow the SOP for another reason.
For example, recently I had three sites where metal detection was found, by CCTV to not be being done as it should. All employees had been trained.
In plant A, the manager retrained the employee.
In plant B, the manager disciplined the employee
In plant C, they did a work analysis of all the tasks the employee was being asked to do and realised it was impossible. Should that employee have raised the issue? If they were honest, they had and hadn't been listened to. There was a lot of introspection about that and they went on to assess other tasks.
I'm not saying that disciplinary action is never warranted but if you've found the training was not done, that's a management failing so the preventive action should go beyond training to understand why an untrained person was being used to operate. If the training was ineffective, that goes beyond retraining because you need to understand why the training wasn't understood. If the training wasn't complied with, which I'd argue is more common than any of the previous points, then, to my mind, you've not finished the RCA until you've understood why the training wasn't complied with and fixed that as the root cause.
I've been working a lot with US sites recently and I'd say that the experience I've encountered is more like plant A or B (which is also the majority of British sites) where the individual is more likely to feel the brunt of the action not being completed whereas some western European sites are more likely to understand the overall context of why it wasn't followed.
This is not me judging by the way. It's as I've learned as I've got older. I've done my fair share of retraining and one point lessons in my time but both in personal experience and auditing others, I see a lot of signs they don't really fix root cause (signs like it keeps happening). And if you do have someone wilfully not following a procedure then why retrain not go straight for at least a verbal warning? Why retrain?
I hope that makes my point a bit clearer. Doesn't mean I'm right, just personal experience and national cultures have a big overlay on approach.
Edited by GMO, Today, 06:28 AM.
