The Spring Laboratory Committee Meeting

The Laboratory Committee met on 26 and 27 March in Bratislava, Slovakia, to discuss the following topics:

• New Guidance on assessment of sampling, including stand-alone sampling;
• Revision of the document EA-4/23 The Assessment and Accreditation of Opinions and Interpretations using ISO/IEC 17025;
• Revision of the document EA-4/22 EA Guidance on Accreditation of Pesticide Residues Analysis in Food and Feed;
• Conclusions of the Train-the-Trainer course on the new EN ISO/IEC 17043 and the Workshop on Externally provided products and services (Subcontracting).

Following the summary report on the WS Subcontracting, a breakout session will be held during the next LC meeting in September 2025 to focus on policy related to:

• Subcontracting on an “ongoing basis”
• Legal entity vs accredited organisation
• Temporary outsourcing.

The EA LC Working Group (WG) Health Care

The EA LC Working Group (WG) Health Care met in Skopje, North Macedonia, on 5 and 6 December.

Members attended a half-day workshop regarding challenges encountered in the transition of accreditation of medical laboratories to EN ISO 15189:2022. The outcome of the 7 working groups will be used for the coming meetings of the WG.

During the meeting, several items were presented and discussed:

• The work for creating the guidelines EA-4/20 for point-of-care-testing (POCT). The guideline EA-4/20 is out for comments in the working group until the beginning of January 2025;
• The gap analysis of EA-4/17 for the presentation of the scope of accreditation of medical laboratories for review, when considering the requirements of the new EA-2/15. No further update is needed at the moment;
• The guidelines for Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) were created as a draft document under the New Work Item Proposal of the EA LC. The guideline for NGS is transferred after the second round of comments in the WG to the EA LC for further treatment and comments.

In addition, participants discussed several questions, such as concerning, metrological traceability, validation and verification issues, and reporting of results. New periodic work items that may be discussed in the WG are related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) used in medical analysis.

The longtime convener of the WG, Rolf Straub, SAS (the Swiss NAB), convened his last meeting and handed over the lead to Hélène Méhay, COFRAC (the French NAB), who started her term in January 2025.