The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) answered by the EA Laboratory Committee (LC) are now available on the EA website.
The LC FAQ list deals for the moment with questions on ISO/IEC 17025:2017 – General requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories, organised under 19 themes such as methods, reports, sampling, accreditation scopes, ILAC documentation/decisions, etc.
Every EA technical committee manages FAQs on the application of those specific standards which they are in charge of.
The process for the LC FAQ is as follow: questions are submitted one month in advance by committee’s Members before the committees’ meetings at which they are discussed and answered, first within the Management Group or FAQ review group (FAQ RG), then by the committees.
After each LC committee meeting, questions will be selected amongst the new ones by the LC FAQ RG for publication on EA’s website.
These questions come directly from the field, and gather concrete experiences and difficulties sometimes faced by EA Members to apply the standards’ requirements. Thanks to this entire system, based on exchanges and sharing experiences, a knowledge database is built.
As agreed by the LC, and further to a thorough revision and fine-tuning in order to transform the content into easily readable and understandable information, the LC FAQs have been published on the EA website, at https://european-accreditation.org/information-center/ea-faq/laboratory-committee/
The LC draws readers’ careful attention on the fact that the answers, which give the consensus view of the committee, are intended for informational purposes and should not be used as official guidance for the implementation of the requirements of the standards concerned.
EA committees are all considering publishing their FAQs, given that the committees’ members support it. The Technical Management Board (TMB) is currently discussing on the elaboration of a more user-friendly common tool for FAQs, especially regarding the search and the presentation of results.
Certification Committee FAQs can also be found on the following link https://european-accreditation.org/information-center/ea-faq/certification-committee/