On February 15, a meeting of the working group on the activities of interlaboratory comparison studies providers at the RusAccreditation Public Council chaired by Alla Kartashova was held. More than 40 people attended the meeting, including representatives of the Federal Service for Accreditation, the National Institute for Accreditation of RusAccreditation, scientific and expert community, accredited organizations, and accreditation experts.
The meeting covered matters of accredited providers’ reporting information on the availability of measuring tools and standards of documentation confirming their compliance with the Accreditation Criteria (Order of the Ministry of Economic Development of Russia No. 326 dated May 30th, 2014) and regulating the relations between employees of a provider and a testing laboratory the equipment of which is used for comparison studies (applicable to laboratories having or lacking accreditation). It was suggested to complement the Accreditation Criteria with requirements for producers of reference standards in the National Accreditation System (ISO 17034:2016 “General Requirements for Competence of Producers of Reference Standards” entering into force in 2019).
Results of testing of a configurator to be used for establishing scopes of accreditation of ICS providers were presented at the meeting. It was noted that the service needed to be improved as regards the reference data or introduced in the information system database.
Participants of the working group also discussed the revision of accounts of ICS providers in the Federal Government Information System (FGIS) 2.0. Deputy Head of RusAccreditation Sergey Migin underlined the importance of launching several laboratory comparison programs in new areas of activities and indicated the opportunity to form an official list of programs on proficiency testing and export of interlaboratory comparison services, first to the countries of the Eurasian region and subsequently to the Asia-Pacific region.