Maintaining Accreditation Bodies

• Maintaining Accreditation Bodies
  • Accreditation Body Scope
  • Use of Accreditation Bodies
    • Creation and Maintenance
    • Accreditation Body Dependencies and Restrictions

An accreditation body is a governing body that certifies and accredits the services and tests performed by a laboratory, for example, regulatory organisations, or a representative of standards for a particular product, substance, service or industry.

Accreditation Body Scope

Accreditation bodies are created at instance-level. An instance of CCLAS can contain multiple accreditation bodies.

Use of Accreditation Bodies

Accreditation or certification from an accreditation body provides confidence to the customers of the laboratory that the analysis performed and methods followed adhere to recognised standards.
The accreditations gained may be included on certificate reports or other materials generated by a laboratory, and can also be an assessment tool in auditing the analytical process to verify that the accreditation is current and practised accurately.

Laboratories can be audited, checked or accredited by external organisations who examine all the processes used in the laboratory to determine if the laboratory meets the accreditation body's prescribed standards. Several international standards can be used to assess and accredit laboratories.

Laboratories can be linked to one or more accreditation bodies. Where a laboratory is linked to an accreditation body, details regarding the accreditation, expiry or suspension dates, and the reference number associated with the accreditation can be stored.

When a laboratory is accredited to perform certain tests, they may include their accreditation status on reports or other materials.

A method can be linked to an accreditation body, a scheme version linked to a method, and an analyte within the scheme can be flagged as being accredited by the laboratory or not (usually this is set on the enabled-scope or lab-scope scheme).

Creation and Maintenance

In CCLAS, accreditation bodies are created at the organisation scope. This allows all accreditation bodies created to be associated with laboratories that fall under an organisation.

Accreditation bodies created at the organisation level can be applied to all relevant laboratories within the organisation.

Those laboratories that meet the accreditation or certification standards can be associated with the relevant accreditation body linked to the laboratory.

Accreditation bodies are created using the CCACCB—Accreditation Body application, which is also accessed using the Analysis Setup » Accreditation Bodies menu option.

For each accreditation body, a unique code, name, description, active status, document and logo can be recorded.

Each laboratory in the system can be associated with multiple accreditation bodies. Information such as when the laboratory received an accreditation, any expiry or suspension dates, and the reference number associated with the accreditation is recorded for each laboratory and each accreditation body.

For further information on managing accreditation bodies, refer to Maintaining Accreditation Bodies.

Accreditation Body Dependencies and Restrictions

No restrictions or dependencies exist for accreditation bodies.