The APLAC, the Asian Pacific Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation, and the PAC, the Pacific Accreditation Cooperation, held their 4th Joint Annual Meetings, including the 23rd APLAC General Assembly, from 16th to 24th June 2017 at Bangkok, Thailand.

On June 17, 2017 APLAC PIC and PAC Communications and Marketing Committee (CMC) co-hosted a joint workshop on “Decoding how accreditation can be a global tool to support public policy”. With 31 participants from 20 countries, this workshop was aimed to provide opportunities for them to learn about case studies form Public Sector Assurance – www.publicsectorassurance.org – and decode how accreditation can be a global tool to support public policy, by selecting case studies on different economy’s “specialty” and 2 EA members of Communication and Publications Committee (CPC) were invited :

  • “Accreditation gives credibility to classification of hotels in France” by Sébastien Laborde -Communication and Promotion Director at COFRAC and EA CPC member
  • “Spreading India’s traditional knowledge of Yoga worldwide: Scheme for Voluntary certification of Yoga Professionals” by Anil Jauhri – NABCB
  • “Appropriate Evaluation for High Quality Medical Examination in Japan” by Katsuji Shimoda – JAB
  • “Accredited food assurance schemes guarantee defined standards of food safety” by Jon Murthy – Marketing Manager at UKAS and EA CPC member

There were 2 objectives to this workshop :
– Learn from session speakers about how it all began; issues they had faced or still facing; and how they had to be creative to overcome such issues all in order to support the public policies.
– Develop ideas or action item(s) for new program(s) or improve existing program(s) before presenting them in a wrap-up session.

Jon Murthy, Marketing Manager at UKAS and EA CPC member: “The workshop provided an excellent opportunity to raise the profile of the Public Sector Assurance website, and to share how it can be used to promote the use of accreditation to support regulators and policy makers.”

EA, as a recognised regional cooperation body of ILAC and IAF, is willing to develop and maintain close and active relationships with its sister organizations, such as the APLAC and the PAC to promote accreditation at an international level and enhance a global confidence in accredited conformity assessments results.

To get more information about :
APLAC – www.aplac.org
PAC – www.apec-pac.org