Sampling techniques and sample handling

Anyone who takes samples — production, quality and laboratory staff — and the people who write their sampling procedures.

Also useful to laboratory staff who receive samples and have to decide whether one is fit to test.

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.

• Sampling plans

  What the plan has to specify, and attribute plans for microbiological criteria

• Representativeness

  Randomisation, increments, composites and the heterogeneity problem

• Technique

  Aseptic sampling, dedicated equipment and avoiding cross-contamination

• Containers and preservation

  Matching the container and preservative to the determination

• Transport

  Temperature, time, hold times, and how the chain is evidenced

• Receipt

  Acceptance criteria, recording condition, and rejecting a sample properly

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. 01Build a sampling plan that produces a sample representing what you needed to know about.
2. 02Sample aseptically without contaminating either the sample or the product.
3. 03Match container, preservation and transport to the determinations requested.
4. 04Assess a sample on receipt and reject it when its condition invalidates the test.

Sampling uncertainty routinely exceeds analytical uncertainty, often by a wide margin, and it is almost never estimated. A laboratory can measure to two per cent and be handed a sample that represents the batch to twenty.

Nothing in the laboratory recovers a bad sample. A warm micro sample, a chlorinated water sample with no thiosulphate, a composite made from one corner of a pallet — each has already produced its wrong answer before the bench sees it.

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.