On November 24, a regular meeting of the Asia Pacific Accreditation Cooperation (APAC) on Capacity Building Committee (CBC) was held. In connection with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it was held via videoconferencing. The event was attended by representatives of RusAccreditation and the National Institute for Accreditation of RusAccreditation.
In the light of the tasks the Cooperation faces - to contribute to capacity building, as well as harmonization of activities in the field of accreditation of accreditation bodies-members of APAC - the main attention during the meeting was paid to the use of IT and telecommunications for transferring training events carried out through APAC into remote format to maintain the continuity of the processes of current training and advanced training of employees of accreditation bodies and experts involved in conducting peer assessments. In particular, they noted the priority importance of further development of the "APAC Knowledge Center" Internet platform, which contained online courses, as well as materials from webinars in various areas of accreditation and conformity assessment. In this regard, the Chairman of the Cooperation, Brahim Houla, informed the participants about the positive experience of interaction in this area with RusAccreditation, which resulted in the translation into Russian and placement on the mentioned Internet resource of the training course developed by APAC on the new version of the standard 17025:2017.
During the meeting, the plans of the Cooperation for conducting training events in 2021 were also discussed. In particular, it is planned to conduct online seminars and trainings in such areas as the accreditation of reference material manufacturers (ISO 17034) and proficiency testing providers (ISO / IEC 17043), medical laboratories (ISO 15189 and ISO 22870), biobanks (ISO 20387).