Lockdown, remote assessments, new ways of working for the teams, counterfeit certificates and products coming on the market with unverified provenance, etc. Since the early beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 crisis was the occasion to test communications on every level: it was one of the major topics dealt with during the last CPC meeting, 22-23 September 2020.

This period was lived differently depending first on the size of the National Accreditation Body (NAB) and the level of COVID-19 pandemic in the country. Small NABs sometimes haven’t got one person dedicated to communications, which makes the response to global crisis more complicated.

Some NABs had to face abrupt lockdown and only got few weeks to entirely reorganize the services: choose which tools to communicate within their teams and with the Conformity Assessment Bodies (CABs), write new procedures, train the teams through webinars, etc.

Starting from March 2020, a lot of NABs have been performing remote assessments for extensions, initial assessment was too complicated to organize remotely.

For COFRAC (French NAB), remote assessments were organized smoothly as a new IT Tool was already in place and functional, to prepare assessment reports. Cofrac assessors have performed over 400 remote assessments in every scope.

NABs prepared also materials to clarify and implement new procedures. TURKAK (Turkish NAB) published several policy and guidance documents in order to avoid significant and critical interruption in the operations, and help assessors to go back to on-site assessments.

Since May, assessors have started performing on-site assessment when needed, but NABs are still privileging remote assessments whenever possible.

Fake news have also been legion for the past months, with a recrudescence of “scientific” articles on the uselessness of masks, how to use them, and how the virus is spreading, etc. For example PCA (Polish NAB) published on its website and Social Media an article on the involvement of notified product certification bodies in the certification process of Personal Protective Equipment. The aim was to explain to the public practical aspects of accredited certification.

A great part of the NAB communications’ teams work aimed to give the clearest information possible through the different channels: dedicated pages on the website, articles relayed on Social Media, newsletter, television and newspaper interventions, etc. In Italy, ACCREDIA (Italian NAB) came to widely use social media, media and public relations, as well as their website, to reach customers (CABs), stakeholders, enterprises and professionals involved at different levels in the Quality Infrastructure.

Thanks to a great collaboration between the EA Members, EA published a document listing the laboratories performing face mask testing, which was regularly updated and turned into a great help not only for the Members, helping them in their struggle with counterfeit certificates and products but also for prescribers, importers and the general public: EA website visitors increased by over 17%, mostly to the pages dedicated to face masks testing, which became the most visited pages on EA’s website, for the period February-August 2020 (the news and the list of accredited laboratories).

CPC Members agreed that the creation of a guide, not only focusing on the COVID-19 crisis, but on any kind of crisis, would be useful for Members, especially for NABs where there are not dedicated communication resources, to help them better apprehend communications’ and global crisis. This topic will be further discussed during the next CPC remote meeting, on 24-25 March 2021.