UKAS Accreditation

This means we are inspected annually by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) against international standards (ISO 15189) and have achieved accreditation.

Accreditation provides quality assurance requiring strict procedures to ensure staffing, equipment, reagents, tests/examinations are fit for purpose and monitored.

Change management procedures ensure that new tests are validated and verified before use and are reviewed at the next inspection to formally accredit new tests.

United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS)

UKAS is the National Accreditation Body for the United Kingdom appointed by government, to assess and accredit organisations that provide services including certification, testing, inspection, and calibration. Information on UKAS can be found here:

United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS)

Accreditation

Accreditation assures service users of a structured management system and that all tests used are quality controlled.

Our laboratory is regularly assessed for compliance against international standards (ISO 15189 medical laboratories - Quality and Competence).

All tests offered by our Immunology Service will have gone through a thorough verification process to check that the test works as expected and the results are meaningful.

A UKAS accredited test means that the process that occurred within the laboratory, to ensure the test is fit for purpose (quality assurance), has been reviewed by UKAS and ratified.

A non-accredited test has been quality assured by the relevant department, but the test has usually been introduced between inspections. The test will have been shown to be fit for purpose, but the quality assurance process itself has not yet had the final sign off from UKAS.

All tests in our Diagnostic Tests repertoire are accredited unless stated otherwise.

Non-accredited tests

A non-accredited tests is safe. It will have been subjected to rigorous in-house verification testing before being offered to service users.

It is simply awaiting UKAS oversight of the verification process.

A small selection of our neuroimmunology tests are also non-accredited; this is because they are performed by the University of Oxford Neuroimmunology Research Group. This is a research laboratory and not a medical laboratory. These have been marked as non-accredited in our test repertoire.

All our non-accredited tests are still subjected to the same quality assurance processes as any other test offered.

Schedule of Accreditation

To find the accreditation details for our laboratory, please visit

Who's accredited - UKAS

Type in our laboratory number 8782 to bring up a link to our most recent Schedule of Accreditation.

This document defines the range of tests and methods that we have been accredited by UKAS to perform.