ISO 13485 §6.3 treats your buildings, equipment, and supporting systems as part of the quality system — not background scenery. Define the infrastructure you need, maintain it on a schedule you actually wrote down, and keep the records to prove it.
ISO 13485 §7.5 is the longest clause in the standard — eleven subclauses that absorbed what the old QSR scattered across Subparts F, G, L, and parts of H and K. Here’s a tour of what changed, what’s genuinely new (customer property, anyone?), and where the gaps tend to live before an FDA inspection.
ISO 13485 §6.2 doesn’t care that Janet has run the line for fifteen years — it cares whether you can prove it. Competence is a defined requirement, not a vibe.
ISO 13485 §6.1 is two sentences long. Those two sentences quietly demand that top management actually fund the QMS — people, equipment, training, and time. “We’ll see what’s left in the budget” is not what the standard had in mind.
ISO 13485 §5.6 requires top management to review the QMS at planned intervals — and no, the meeting where the CEO drops in for fifteen minutes and says “great work, team” does not count.
§5.5.3 looks like the easiest clause in ISO 13485 — a single short paragraph about communication. It’s also the clause most likely to make your production lead say ‘I think there’s a poster in the break room?’ when the auditor asks how the QMS is communicated.
Section 5.5.2 is short, simple, and surprisingly easy to fumble. Name a real member of management, give them real authority, and for heaven’s sake put it in writing before the auditor asks.
If everyone owns quality, nobody does. ISO 13485 §5.5.1 asks you to define, document, and communicate who is responsible for what — and yes, that means your org chart needs to be more recent than 2019.
ISO 13485 §§5.4.1 and 5.4.2 require you to turn your quality policy from a wall decoration into a measurable plan. Here’s what quality objectives actually need to look like — and why ‘improve customer satisfaction’ is not one of them.
Every medical device company has a quality policy. Most couldn’t tell you what’s in it. Here’s what ISO 13485 §5.3 actually requires — and why ‘We are committed to quality and customer satisfaction’ doesn’t cut it.