Accreditation of laboratories important
Thu, 06/16/2016 - 12:00am
Having laboratories which are accredited is important is ensuring that the products that are tested in them would adhere to international standards and therefore, ready for export.
This is according to Dr. Claire Durant, Project Coordinator for the Laboratory Quality Management Systems at the CARICOM Regional Organisation for Standards and Quality (CROSQ) who delivered remarks at the Workshop on ‘The Importance of Standards, Quality, and Accreditation’ at the Savannah Hotel recently.
She said that standardization involves many different aspects and therefore, it is essential to ensure that all of these areas are met. In some cases, inspections can also be carried out to ensure that these standards are being met by the respective organization.
“So national quality infrastructure, if we look at it and we are talking about not only Barbados, but all over the region and the world, standardization involves technical resolution, it involves metrology which is scientific metrology, industrial metrology, legal metrology, then we have inspections, which as we know, inspections is when people visit, look and see how things are being done and organized and having different documents.”
Durant said that even if a product is inspected in this island, it can also undergo further inspections once it reaches its destination country.
“So we have persons here from the Ministry of Trade for example and what they would look at if they were looking at something like Barbados wanted to export a product to a country. How do we know that the product that we are exporting is going to b accepted when we consider the World Trade Organization and they have their rules, the product that is inspected in Barbados and that it can also be inspected when they arrive to the countries to which they were exported and one of the most important things is that this product is tested in laboratories that are accredited. That means that the test results are accepted all over the world.”
As a result, it is imperative for organizations like CROSQ to assist these laboratories in getting accredited, she said.
“The most important thing is that we have to make sure and we have to help laboratories work towards their accreditation so that we can find that Barbados is operating on the same level as all of the other countries in the world.” (PJT)