Laboratory method performance and result validity

Bench analysts and their supervisors, and anyone who has to defend a number that a customer or an assessor has questioned.

Useful immediately after a validation course, and useful on its own to staff who run validated methods without having been taught what the validation figures mean.

The syllabus below is the standard shape of the course. It is adjusted to the matrices, methods and instruments you actually run, which is agreed before delivery rather than discovered on the day.

• Accuracy and trueness

  Two words often used as one, and the difference that matters

• Precision

  Repeatability, intermediate precision and reproducibility, and which applies where

• Bias

  Detecting it, quantifying it, and the decision about whether to correct for it

• Recovery

  Spiking studies, matrix effects and what a recovery figure does and does not license

• Ongoing verification

  Demonstrating that performance established at validation still holds

• Result validity

  The 17025 clause, and the practical monitoring that satisfies it

Courses are written around what a delegate can do afterwards, not what was presented to them. These are the outcomes this one is built to produce.

1. 01Explain what each performance figure on your method file actually tells you.
2. 02Recognise when a result is outside the performance the method was validated for.
3. 03Choose appropriate ongoing checks rather than running every check available.
4. 04Answer a customer challenge on a result with the specific figure that addresses it.

A laboratory can hold a complete validation file and still not know which of its figures to reach for when a result is challenged. Precision answers one kind of challenge, recovery answers another, and offering the wrong one reads as not understanding your own method.

This is also the course that makes ongoing result-validity monitoring proportionate. Laboratories tend to either monitor almost nothing or monitor everything at the same intensity, and both are expensive in different ways.

Delivered over 1 day, at your site or at the laboratory, in English or Arabic. Sessions are built around real records, real data and real failures rather than slides of clause numbers, and the people delivering them spend the rest of the week doing the thing being taught.

Group size is agreed in advance — practical sessions are capped so that everyone works rather than watches. An attendance certificate is issued to each delegate on completion.

Ask about any subject not listed here. If it is not something we teach well, we will say so rather than build it for the sake of the booking.