Technical barriers to trade created for small laboratories with reference to the new international standard ISO/IEC 17025

M.B.A.Laboratories have historically been required to demonstrate competence to test or calibrate against a scope of accreditation that details specific tests and/or measurements in order to ensure equivalence of technical output. The international standardisation community appears to believe that greater focus on quality system elements will contribute to increased confidence in the work performed by organisations that implement them. Unfortunately, a valid system only guarantees consistent output. The potential danger of laboratory tests that are consistent but wrong is too great to be ignored. These fundamentally conflicting philosophies of competence versus compliance are now being combined into one document, the recent revision of ISOIIEC Guide 25 into the ISOIIEC FDIS 17025 General requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories. In preparing for the change to the new standard, smaller laboratories are faced with a potential disproportionate increase in documentation requirements even though their demonstrated competence is already accepted internationally. The primary aim of this research is to determine if there are differences between implementation of the revised standard in a smaller laboratory to that of the larger laboratory that should be considered in order to ensure that the smaller facility is not subject to a potential technical barrier to trade. As part of the research, a questionnaire was created and distributed to test assumptions about the current knowledge of quality requirements within laboratories, the value obtained to date with implementing such systems and the ability of the laboratory staff to cope with more in-depth or any additional quality criteria that might be introduced..