Exercises Collaboration

Products banned is a collaborative exercise. WHO collects, screens and processes the information relating to government s regulatory measures on pharmaceuticals, and on the health related and environmental reasons for these measures. UNEP/IRPTC performs a similar function for chemical products and the United Nations cowdinates the inputs, incoqtorates other available data, collects and reviews the commercial data, and edits, translates and publishes the directory which is a substantial volume of approaching 800 pages. 

Thus, a broad range of sometimes complementary analytical techniques is available at present for the characterisation of the various PAH/POM emissions. For standardisation purposes, candidate methods must be tested extensively in a collaborative exercise to determine and evaluate repeatability, reproducibility and recovery criteria before final definition and approval. (Recently, the method detection limit, defined as the concentration which can be detected at a specific confidence level, was proposed as one criterion for assessing the performance of an analytical method (18)). 

Prieto L, et al. (2003) The 2000-2001 GEPTSFG collaborative exercise on MTDNA assessing the cause of unsuccessful mtDNA PCR amplification of hair shaft samples. Forensic Science International 134 46-53. 

Comparing these various factors one may deduce that linoleic acid might have a more negative SCIR than oleic acid, but why this should be is still a mystery. We are at present involved in a collaborative exercise (Woodbury et aL, 1995) with Dr Richard Evershed and his group at the University of Bristol, where there is a sensitive GC-MS apparatus for measuring the isotope ratio of individual peaks in a GC chromatogram. 

We have described new routes to useful preceramic organosilicon polymers and have demonstrated that their design is an exercise in functional group chemistry. Furthermore, we have shown that an organosilicon polymer which seemed quite unpromising as far as application is concerned could, through further chemistry, be incorporated into new polymers whose properties in terms of ceramic yield and elemental composition were quite acceptable for use as precursors for ceramic materials. It is obvious that the chemist can make a significant impact on this area of ceramics. However, it should be stressed that the useful applications of this chemistry can only be developed by close collaboration between the chemist and the ceramist. 

This chapter has considered two of the types of interlaboratory comparison exercise in which your laboratory may participate. It is important to remember that proficiency testing schemes and collaborative studies have different aims. The former is a test of the performance of the laboratory, whereas the latter is used to evaluate the performance of a particular analytical method. Laboratories should participate in proficiency testing schemes (where an appropriate scheme is available) as this provides an independent check of the laboratory s performance. This chapter has described the key features of proficiency testing schemes and explained how the results from participation in a scheme should be interpreted. 

You were urged in Chapters 3 and 4 not to allow your learning project to be seen merely as a training exercise. If it was, you may find that collaboration received in the course of it was not real collaboration you were simply being indulged to help you in your development . It is all over now. What is vital is that, if this was not already so, you use the occasion of the project to establish initiation and leadership of change as an intrinsic part of your management role. 

The literature contains examples of collaborative trials that only prove that the method was not fit for its intended purpose The full lUPAC harmonised protocol is by its very nature an extensive and expensive exercise. From an economic perspective such trials should only be undertaken when there is good and well-documented evidence that it is likely that the method under evaluation is sufficiently robust. Investment of time and intellectual effort in method selection and the other aspects of the user requirements specification will pay great dividends. Prevention is better and nearly always cheaper than cure. 

International network organized by the IDRC (International Development Research Centre), in collaboration with the National Water Research Institute and the Saint-Lawrence Centre of Environment Canada, to undertake bioanalytical intercalibration exercises with participating laboratories from eight different countries (Argentina, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Mexico and Ukraine). The battery of simple, affordable and robust tests was initially selected to detect the toxic potential of chemical contaminants in drinking water and freshwater sources. Volume 2(7). 

The objective of improvement schemes is to study and validate each step of different analytical procedures applied by different laboratories in a collaborative manner. Such programmes usually involve groups of 20-50 laboratories. In the best case, each critical step of the procedure should be evaluated in an adapted exercise. The individual steps may be studied with a series of different materials in a stepwise manner. In principle the strategy consists of starting from the simplest matrix, e.g. pure solutions and/or mixtures of compounds in solution, for testing the performance of the detector. The analysis of more complex matrices (e.g. raw extract, purified extract) enables the separation and/or clean-up steps to be tested, whereas solid samples are used to test the entire procedure. Spiked samples can be analysed to evaluate the extraction procedure, within the limits of this evaluation (as commented in Section 2.3.1). Such an approach is actually similar to the steps that should be followed when developing and validating a new method in a laboratory. 

Cull MR, Dobbs AJ, Goudot M, et al. 1984. Polychlorodibenzo-p-dioxins and dibenzofurans in technical pentachlorophenol - results of a collaborative analytical exercise. Chemosphere 13 1157-1165. 

Quantitative results for Se-Met (59 and 68% of total Se in wheat Bour and in yeast) in good agreement with the mean values obtained in collaborative interlaboratory exercise... 

The FEMVTF program [1] proved to be a very useful learning exercise for all involved in the collaboration. In the interest of brevity, the results will not be repeated here since they have been very recently reported [10 - 17]. Key findings may be summarized as follows ... 

A second year passed and in March 2006 a larger conference took place in Burlington, Vermont. For the first time Quebec health officials participated, allowing for more cohesive collaboration all along the border. The conference featured discussions about disease surveillance procedures and alerts and included a table-top exercise about a foodborne bacterial outbreak that criss-crossed state and Canadian borders. The exercise allowed health officials to hear how their counterparts in other states and provinces would handle the information they had. Who would they tell When And how ... 

---