ISO/IEC 17025: history and introduction of concepts

• Autor(a) principal: Miguel,Anna Luísa Ribeiro
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: Moreiraa,Renata Pereira Lopes, Oliveira,André Fernando de
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Química Nova (Online)
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0100-40422021000600792
• topic: quality management system; quality assurance; laboratory accreditation; traceability; reliable results

Quality is an increasingly present concept nowadays, so meeting the customers’ needs, who buy and use products and hire services, becomes essential. For laboratories, the concept is applied to the reliability and traceability of the results produced and presents itself not only to meet the customer’s needs, but also to allow the signing of agreements in the international trade. The concept of Quality in a laboratory can be carried out from the elaboration of a Quality Management System (QMS). To this end, the normative document ISO/IEC 17025, internationally accepted, has been changing over the years aimed at instructing the elaboration of a management system which proves the technical capacity of testing and calibration laboratories and guides the generation of reliable results. The document is in its third version as a standard, the most current one published in 2017, and it presents requirements to achieve the proposed objective and the quality assurance. In the face of the importance of these concepts and the unquestionable need of laboratories to provide reliable and traceable results, this article presents the norm history and its most recent changes. Its intent is support laboratories whose objective is to implement a QMS according to this normative reference.