Encourage sharing of competences between accreditation bodies

ongoing

Cooperation between accreditation bodies could be a cost-effective way of sharing competence and offering a wide range of accreditation services to companies, without having all the facilities in each Member State. The aim of the project is to contact and discuss with the accreditation bodies to find out in which areas there are special needs for cooperation. The project has been divided into 4 phases. Discussions with the accreditation bodies on needs for cooperation (Phase 1) have already started. Swedac has been in contact with FINAS, DANAK EAK, LNAB and LATAK in this topic and got a positive response from 3 of them. Areas that have been proposed are accreditation of medical laboratories, accreditation of PT-providers, assessment/accreditation of Notified Bodies and GHG verifiers among others.It has been decided to choose 3 to 5 objects among the proposed areas and for each of these start specific discussions (Phase 2), both by e-mail and at least 1 meeting/workshop per area. At these meetings the main discussion shall be: how can we cooperate and exchange experience among lead assessors and technical assessors and is it possible to use the same technical experts by all accreditation bodies. The next steps would be to create, within each area, a network with one responsible contact person and to create, within each area, a pool of technical assessors with specific competence (Phase 3). Phase 4 will be using and developing the experience from phase 1 – 3 to expand other areas within the national accreditation work and also to create a pool of expert for support strengthening of accreditation work in developing countries.

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