UKAS training (Phase 2!) - ISO 17025

My two working worlds have truly collided - taking my love of microbiology, diagnostics and farming into my own business! This week marks the next phase of my UKAS training, focusing on ISO 17025 accreditation, so it's all feeling very real now!

It’s a wee bit of a side step from the AI training, and an exciting opportunity to build on the experience I already have within the world of laboratory quality and accreditation.

As a manager of a UKAS-accredited microbiology diagnostic laboratory in my full-time job, ISO 17025 is something I’m very familiar with. I see its requirements in practice every day - from maintaining technical competence and ensuring robust processes, to managing quality and making sure the results we produce can be trusted.

What makes this training particularly interesting is the opportunity to look at ISO 17025 from a different perspective. Rather than simply applying the standard within my own laboratory, I’m developing a broader understanding of how UKAS assesses competence and quality against the standard.

For those less familiar with ISO 17025, it is essentially about confidence in laboratory results. It provides an internationally recognised framework for demonstrating that laboratories have the people, processes, equipment and systems needed to produce reliable and technically valid results.

Quality and accreditation can sometimes feel like things that happen quietly in the background, but they underpin a huge amount of the work we rely on every day. Whether it’s testing materials, monitoring the environment, supporting veterinary diagnoses or informing scientific decisions, confidence in laboratory results matters a great deal.

I’m looking forward to the next stage of this training and to developing my knowledge and experience further. And, as with any new challenge, I’m looking forward to seeing where it takes me.

I've worked as a poultry farmer and a pig farmer for many of my previous years, and it's exciting to now support farmers, vets and now other laboratories in disease diagnostics.