Microbiological testing techniques and contamination control

Microbiology analysts and technicians, and quality staff responsible for the microbiology bench.

Practical throughout. Technique is taught at the bench, because it is not learnable from a slide.

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.

• Aseptic technique

  Working practice that keeps the environment out of the sample

• Sample handling

  Homogenisation, dilution series and plating, and the errors each step carries

• Incubation

  Temperature mapping, loading, timing and their effect on recovery

• Contamination control

  Laboratory layout, airflow, personnel flow, cleaning and monitoring

• Reading plates

  Countable ranges, confluence, spreaders and typical versus atypical colonies

• Confirmation

  When a presumptive result must be confirmed before it is reported

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. 01Work aseptically to a standard that survives an observed technique assessment.
2. 02Produce a dilution series whose arithmetic and technique both hold.
3. 03Judge whether a plate is countable and handle it correctly when it is not.
4. 04Identify contamination as a laboratory artefact rather than reporting it as a result.

Microbiological results are produced by technique more than by instrumentation, which means the analyst is the method. Two people running the same procedure can produce reliably different counts.

Incubator temperature distribution is the quiet one — a mapped incubator and an unmapped one can differ by more than a degree between shelves, and recovery of stressed organisms is sensitive to exactly that.

Delivered over 2 days, 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.