By Alva Solomon
EVEN as World Accreditation Day was celebrated globally on Thursday, the Eureka Medical Laboratory and the Guyana Rice Development Board (GRDB) have upgraded their laboratory facilities to achieve international accreditation so as to satisfy the international requirements of their customers.In Guyana, entities which conduct laboratory tests are nationally certified by the Guyana National Bureau of standards (GNBS), however, accreditation is the result of several procedures, beyond certification, which leads to an entity being internationally accredited to trade in various products.
A lab technician operates a machine at the GNBS lab where she separates white rice from the rice paddy
GNBS Public Relations Officer (PRO) Lloyd David told this newspaper that accreditation is a tool which can be used to assess bodies that offer services such as testing. “So when they (Eureka) deliver a test or a test result, it will be accepted in other countries,” he said. For an entity to be accredited, it will provide a proposal to the GNBS and that body will conduct a “gap analysis,” which includes audits and reports on findings during a period of assessment.
Painstaking. A young employee separates the varied grains of rice at the GRDB laboratory during the grading process
For Eureka Lab, accreditation has brought satisfaction to the staff of the facility. CEO of the lab, Andrew Boyle, told this newspaper that accreditation will positively impact business there, while noting that expansion of the lab’s infrastructure is under way. Accreditation, according to Boyle, provides the business “with a lot of confidence, self-satisfaction and I think it should also give our client confidence in us.” He said that the process leads to “extremely high standards,” as he noted the importance of certification. “Certification opens the doors and made it quite easy for us,” he said, as he recounted the road to accreditation. He added that the lab has always been known for its high standards including its state-of-the-art equipment, which he noted provided the leeway for accreditation to be achieved with ease. According to the GNBS, this year, the focus of accreditation is on the public sector in tandem with the theme for World Accreditation Day, which is “Accreditation: A Global Tool to Support Public Policy.” The GNBS PRO noted that it is important that the conformity assessment bodies, another term for certified entities, expand their reach to be accredited. He said that move bodes well for national development. He cited the GRDB being a public sector agency, whose accreditation can benefit the country, since its mandate surrounds the export of rice, a commodity which impacts the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) annually.
During a tour of the GRDB at Cowan Street in Kingston, Allison Peters, Quality Control Manager, told the media that the body has been certifying rice since around 1994-95 when it was established. Prior to that, certification was done by the then National Paddy and Rice Grading Centre. She said the accreditation process “took us many long years” to attain, a status which it eclipsed last year. Prior to that, the body was certified by the GNBS for some five years. “Most people in Guyana do not understand the benefits of being accredited,” she said, noting that the process of accreditation ensures the system is traceable from the destination point of a product to its initial handlers. Peters said the GNBS has been working with millers in order for them to understand the importance of accreditation. She said when the country started exporting rice to Panama, an international body came here to sample the rice prepped for exportation. “They came to use our lab facilities and because we were in the process of being accredited, now Panama accept our certificates as being the certificate of choice,” she noted. She added that it is mandatory that the GNBS issues the relevant certificate for any quantity of rice which is being exported from Guyana. “Accreditation has to do with credibility with the people who are doing the job, to show that you are comfortable to obtain the end results,” Peters added. She said the process is very expensive; however, the Caricom Regional Organisation for Standards and Quality (CROSQ) assisted the GRDB financially in funding the placement of a consultant who travelled to Guyana to assist the rice body in the preparation process for accreditation.
Staffers of the Eureka Laboratory were busy on World Accreditation Day which was celebrated globally on Thursday
“We ended up having full funding to undertake the processes,” which she noted costs thousands of US dollars. Candel Walter Bostick, Head of the Conformity Department of the , noted that one of the main objectives of CROSQ is to promote accreditation across the Caribbean region to ensure that the locally manufactured products and services are accepted at the international level. Walter-Bostick, who was on hand at the GRDB office, said since the authorities are now promoting accreditation, “We have started to put much recognition to World Accreditation Day since 2010.” She said that over the year, sensitisation has grown and the two labs which were highlighted on Thursday were accredited in less than a year. “A lot of credit should be added to our laboratory certification programme, because most of our laboratories were certified to the national standard which kind of created the foundation for them to prepare for accreditation,” Walter-Bostwick added.
