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QualityTerm

CAPA: Corrective and Preventive Action

CAPA stands for Corrective and Preventive Action: the fixed way of working to resolve a problem, remove its cause and prevent similar problems, including a check on the result.

Explanation

CAPA is the route from problem to lasting solution. You record a non-conformity, incident or complaint, repair the immediate damage, investigate the cause, choose corrective and preventive actions, carry them out and check that they work. Only then do you close the file.

Corrective means: removing the cause of something that happened, so it does not come back. Preventive means: preventing a potential problem that has not happened yet. Both need an owner, a deadline and a check. Without those three, a CAPA remains a list of good intentions.

The term is common in, among others, pharma and medical devices, but is widely used. How ISO standards name it exactly differs, the core is the same everywhere. Use a full CAPA file for what is structural: a one-off small error does not always call for a full process.

Example from practice

The same error has occurred three times in a row in order processing. The CAPA records the cause (an unclear work instruction), changes that instruction, instructs the team and checks after two months whether the error has disappeared.

© 2026 BrydgeOne. General information, not legal or other professional advice. No rights can be derived from this explanation.

In BrydgeOne

Where you work with CAPA

ActionsFollow up corrective and preventive actions. Incidents & reportsLog incidents and turn them into follow-up. Quality reportsLog nonconformities and complaints in a structured way. AuditsPlan internal audits and log findings. ISO 9001Quality
Knowledge base

Keep reading

CAPA: how to follow up corrective and preventive actions effectivelyCAPA stands for Corrective and Preventive Action. It is how you solve a problem for good and stop it from coming back. This article walks through the route from report to root cause, action and effectiveness check. Incident investigation: finding the root cause with the 5 whys methodIncident investigation starts with a simple question: why did this happen? If you keep asking it, you often end up at a cause in how the work is organized rather than at the person who happened to be there. Below you can read how that works in practice. Registering and handling a nonconformity: steps and an NCR exampleA nonconformity is a situation in which a requirement is not met, such as a specification, a procedure, a legal requirement or a customer agreement. You record it in an NCR (nonconformity report), limit the damage straight away, find the cause, take a corrective action and close it only once the effect has been checked. Below are the steps, the fields of a good NCR form and a worked example.
Glossary

See also

Corrective actionCorrective actionPreventive actionPreventive actionRoot cause analysisRoot cause analysisEffectiveness checkEffectiveness checkNon-conformityNon-conformity

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