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Accreditation
Introduction
Laboratory accreditation is an independent third-party recognition of laboratory competence. Accreditation to ISO/IEC 17025 or, for medical laboratories, ISO 15189, demonstrates that a laboratory's management and quality procedures meet the requirements of these important standards for competence. Accreditation has become a cornerstone of many regulations, and is often required for laboratories undertaking any form of regulatory analysis.
For customers, accreditation is a mark of quality, providing confidence in the results from an accredited laboratory. For laboratories, it offers national and international recognition, and wide public and industry acceptance. Accreditation can improve staff motivation and esteem through recognition of the quality of their work, and can help ensure a safe and effective laboratory testing environment.
Achieving and maintaining accreditation requires comprehensive attention to all of the laboratories' activities. It can be daunting for a new laboratory, and even an accredited laboratory needs to keep up with changes in accreditatin standards and policies. Eurachem provides a range of guides to help laboratories understand the requirements of different standards, and to implement particular technical elements of the standards. This page helps laboratories locate Eurachem resources on this site that can help laboratories to meet the best-practice requirements for acreditation.
Resources
Guidance on accreditation
Eurachem maintains two Guides on the general requirements of accreditation.
- The Guide to Quality in Analytical Chemistry: An Aid to Accreditation gives guidance on best practice for analytical measurement, providing practical interpretation of general accreditation requirements. The Guide focuses on the requirements of ISO/IEC 17025 but is also be of use to organisations seeking accreditation or certification against the requirements of standards such as ISO 15189 or ISO 9001 and in meeting other good practice requirements.
- Our Accreditation for Microbiological Laboratories provides similar guidance, focused on accreditation of microbiological laboratories. It includes additional guidance on, for example, measurement uncertainty and metrological traceability for microbiological tests
Eurachem also provide many short guidance documents, in the form of information leaflets. For a short guide to the main changes in ISO 17025:2019, consult our leaflet "ISO/IEC 17025:2017 - A New Accreditation Standard".
Technical guidance on specific topics
Eurachem maintains guides on a range of technical topics, all of which can be found via our list of Eurachem Guides. Guides of particular interest for laboratory accreditation include:
- Selection, Use and Interpretation of Proficiency Testing (PT) Schemes by Laboratories, which explains proficiency testing and gived guidance on appropriate schemes and frequency.
- Quantifying Uncertainty in Analytical Measurement , giving practical guidance on evaluating measurement uncertainty in analytical laboratories.
- The Fitness for Purpose of Analytical Methods: A Laboratory Guide to Method Validation and Related Topics, covering the assessment of performance of analytical methods.
- Traceability in Chemical Measurement, on establishing metrological traceability in an analytical chemistry laboratory.
The Reading List
Guidance on many other technical topics can be found on our Eurachem Guides page.
The Eurachem Reading List is a large collection of useful publications. For accreditation, the section on "Quality assurance and accreditation" contains over 40 links to key Standards, Guides and refereed publications relating to accreditation requirements, policy and practice.
Other accreditation resources on this site
Other resources include:
- Proficiency Testing and Accreditation, a short article on how proficiency testing supports accreditation
- How Eurachem supports Accreditation, a short article on Eurachem's rousources and activities in support of accreditation.
- Presentations from our workshops, which include many individual presentations on current practice in accreditation.
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- Last Updated: Thursday, 08 June 2023 19:43