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The promise of a single national accreditation promise is not a cheap, easy
way for commercial laboratories to become certified in all states allowing
them to compete with in-state laboratories. The real promise of NELAC was
the goal of a single accreditation system that would assure that
consistently high quality environmental data would be collected in all
states. This was the vision of Jeanne Hankins and a guiding principle of
that first NELAC Board of Directors. Thus far, NELAC has failed to fulfill
that promise.
Somewhere between implementation by the states and the EPA/NELAC/INELA split, we
lost sight of the goal and started to focus on "what needed to be done" and
"what could be done quickly to solve the problem". We started to patch
and we stopped building. No one at that first stakeholders meeting said
it could not be done. We all asked; "how can we help?" We are moving
toward a NELAC that is a lowest common denominator rather than building a
standard of quality which would be a goal worth achieving.
Clearly, within the new NELAC/INLEA process it is going to be more difficult to
generate change. The private sector, the people most affected by the accreditation
of laboratories, will be required to find new ways to refocus first INELA and
ultimately NELAC on the necessary reforms. The first step in this process is to
insure that INELA becomes a truly consensus organization with balanced participation
by all affected parties regardless of their former position in the old NELAC
structure. Consensus is about conflict and conflict resolution. True consensus
organizations resolve conflict in open discussion and with a clear vote of all present.
The fundamental premise of laboratory accreditation based upon ISO 17025 is
Quality Systems implementation by the laboratory and verification by the
accrediting authority. Accreditation in the international community requires
a demonstration of technical competency by the laboratory and a certification
of that competency by the accrediting authority. With PT acceptance limits
in the WP program set at three standard deviations, laboratories results which
have a less than a 5% chance of being right are considered acceptable. In the
WS drinking water program, laboratory results with a less than 10% of being
right are being considered acceptable for accreditation. This cannot possibly
be considered a demonstration of technical competency.
Accreditation does work and has been shown to be a successful strategy in
other areas around the world. If it is going to work here, we cannot simply
"adjust" the old adversarial system of state versus laboratory versus
industry. We must rebuild the system of trust and cooperation toward a
common goal established by Jeanne at that first NELAC meeting so long
ago. Now is not the time to abandon NELAC. Now is the time to re-double
our efforts to finish what we started.
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