Laboratory Accreditation: Getting there is Just the Beginning

Why Should You Attend:

Why do you want to become accredited? Where do you start? For laboratories that are already accredited, how do you ensure staff adherence to regulations and ongoing compliance to minimize corrective actions arising from accreditation audits? Getting there is relatively easy. Staying there is the hard part.

Many laboratories struggle with developing and implementing a functional Quality Management System (QMS) that not only complies with the management and technical requirements of ISO/IEC 17025:2005 but also meets their needs. Once accreditation has been achieved many laboratories have difficulty maintaining the QMS as evidenced by the number of non-conformances cited during the subsequent biannual audits.

This webinar will address not only how to develop a QMS that will affect the day to day operation of the laboratory, but also how to maintain it.

Learning Objectives:

Developing a Quality Management System (QMS) as a prerequisite for getting accredited is relatively easy. Maintaining the QMS to retain your accreditation status is the real challenge and a measure of the robustness your System.

Areas Covered in the Webinar:

• Defining a Quality Management System (QMS)
• Management components of a QMS
• Technical components of a QMS
• Method selection, validation and verification
• Ensuring analytical competency
• Ensuring analyst competency

Who Will Benefit:

This webinar will provide valuable assistance to all personnel in:

• Laboratory management/Supervision
• Laboratory quality development
• Laboratory quality management
• Laboratory quality control
• Analytical support

Michael Brodsky
Lead Auditor, Canadian Association for Laboratory Accreditation

Michael Brodsky, has been an Environmental Microbiologist for more than 41 years. Mr. Brodsky is a Past President of the Ontario Food Protection Association and AOAC International. He serves as Chair for the AOAC Expert Review Committee for Microbiology, as a scientific reviewer in Microbiology for the AOAC OMA and the AOAC Research Institute, as a reviewer for Standard Method for the Examination of Water and as a chapter editor on QA for the Compendium of Methods in Microbiology. He is also a lead auditor/assessor in microbiology for the Canadian Association for Laboratory Accreditation (CALA) and is a member of the Board of Directors.

Topic Background:

Developing a Quality Management System (QMS) as a prerequisite for getting accredited is relatively easy. Maintaining the QMS to retain your accreditation status is the real challenge and a measure of the robustness your QSM. Many laboratories regard Quality Assurance, Quality Assessment and Quality Control as independent activities, others use the terms interchangeably, e.g. QA/QC. This demonstrates a lack of appreciation of the interrelationships between Assurance, Assessment and Control, as well as the differences, particularly between QA and QC. This has created confusion in the minds of many analysts with respect to understanding how QA and QC play separate, but related roles for achieving Quality Assurance in a Quality Management System (QMS).

QMS is the catch phrase for accreditation and is the backbone of ISO/IEC Standard 17025:2005. Accreditation to international standards is being becoming the norm in the global analytical community. Although essentially voluntary, there are many jurisdictions that now require food and environmental laboratories to be accredited to ISO/IEC 17025 in order to participate in regulatory programs.

Follow us :