Proficiency testing experiment

In accreditation the assessment team should consist of assessors/technical experts able to assess all relevant issues including the competence of the staff of the laboratory. This competence needs to be documented by relevant academic/technical qualifications, experience and training as well as successful participation in proficiency testing. 

Koch M, Baumeister F (2008) Traceable reference values for routine drinking water proficiency testing first experiences. Accred. Qual. Assm. 13, 77-82... 

Attempts to correlate analytical performance with other seemingly indicative laboratory characteristics, such as participation in proficiency testing schemes, regular use of certified RMs, number of years of experience and number of samples analysed per year were all equally unsuccessful. Therefore, in the absence of any simple and obvious means of identifying and preselecting only reliable laboratories as participants in certification studies, an investigation was undertaken of the validity of adopting the consensus mean (after outlier elimination) from an interlaboratory study as a certified value. 

ACN) Online SPE Cyclone (50x0.5 mm, 50 pm) (50x2.1 mm, 5 pm) acid/ACN (0.1% formic acid) (MRM) r2>0.99 — Intra-/inter-day imprecision %CV <15% — Intra-/inter-day inaccuracy MRE 15% — Matrix effect (post-column infusion experiment) — Dilution integrity (1 /2 and 1/10) %CV <15% — Carry over — External proficiency test — Application to real specimens... 

On the basis of this framework from the CWC, the Technical Secretariat and the OPCW Laboratory have built a complex network of linked procedures for sampling and analysis and related activities. Experience gathered during inspections, training, exercises, and proficiency tests led to improvement... 

There were differences identified in the degree of difficulty between the first 10 proficiency tests. These differences are a result of the changing sample composition, that is, different matrices, spiking chemicals, and background materials. It is mainly a laboratory s experience in the analysis of CWC-related chemicals that seems to allow the participants to cope with these varying challenges. The Technical Secretariat tries to maintain a similar degree... 

The most important experiments (see Section 3.5) in the verification of CWC-related chemicals by NMR spectroscopy are 1H, 31P 1H, 19F, 31P, and 13C 1H (listed in the order of importance in the interlaboratory comparison/proficiency tests Figure 1). These 1-D experiments are useful both for the identification of chemicals and in structure elucidation. The 1H, 19F, 31P 1H, and/or... 

Obtain initial estimates from replication and comparison of methods experiments. Obtain ongoing estimates from routine QC and proficiency testing surveys. 

One aspect of the FBI/DNA Advisory Board standards is a requirement for accreditation. The National Forensic Science Technology Center and the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors/Laboratory Accreditation Board (ASCLD/LAB) accredit crime laboratories. ASCLD/ LAB requirements include minimal educational credits and experience, proficiency testing twice a year per analyst, and annual audits. All testing requires a technical and an administrative review. An additional NDIS audit is required by the FBI. ludicial scrutiny provides another layer of critical review of those cases heard in court. Defense review and challenge, however, vary greatly. 

Mr Stephan Forster and Ms Christina Rauber (formerly HMGU) are acknowledged for immunoanalysis of water samples during proficiency tests and tank experiments. Many thanks to Dr Natalie Guigues (BRGM, Orleans, France) and to Dr Ian Allan (University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom) for providing us samples from the tank experiments. In part, this research was funded by EU project SWIFT-WFD (SSPI-CT-2003-502492). 

Experiment 39 provides practice in method validation and quality control, and Experiment 40 is an exercise in proficiency testing. These are class team experiments. Read these, even if they are not part of your assigned laboratory exercises. 

To calculate z values for all the class results of one or more experiments, and to compare the z value of your results with those of the remainder of the class. Review proficiency testing in Chapter 4 before beginning the experiment. 

New. A new microscale titration experiment is included, provided by Professor John Richardson from Shippensburg State University, for the analysis of hard-water samples (Experiment 18). The tools an4 techniques used for that experiment could be used to design similar experiments for other titrations if desired. (If your in-stractor tries this with you, I may include your experiment in the next edition ) Two team experiments are added (Experiments 39 and 40) to illustrate the principles presented in Chapter 4 on statistical validation. One is on method validation and quality control, in which different members of teams perform different parts of the validation for a chosen experiment. The other is on proficiency testing, in which you calculate the z-values for all the student results of one or more class experiments and you compare your z-value to see how well you have performed. 

As we have seen, proficiency testing schemes allow the competence of laboratories to be monitored, compared and perhaps improved. By contrast a collaborative trial (CT) aims to evaluate the precision of an analytical method, and sometimes its ability to provide results free from bias. It is normally a one-off experiment involving expert or competent laboratories, all of which by definition use the... 

Kanaujia et al. [7] investigated the use of GC-MS for the analysis of soil samples from OPCW proficiency testing for alkyl phosphonic acid degradation products. Detection limits for these experiments ranged from 0.05-0.1 i.gmL for full scan and 0.0005-0.005 igmL for SIM, with recoveries of 90-95% for monobasic and 60-75% for dibasic alkyl phosphonic degradation products [7]. 

It is common that commercial calorimeters have internal, automatic calibration. Although this makes a calorimeter user friendly, it is problematic if the user does not know whether the calibrations are accurate. One way to check whether the instrument is working properly and whether the user is performing the measurement in a correct way is to run a validation procedure, i.e. an experiment with a known outcome (proficiency test). A number of such chemical calibration systems are described by Wadso and Goldberg (2001) however, none is similar to cement hydration measurements. It is therefore of interest to establish reference cements - or other similar systems, for example, based on calcium hemihydrate - that can be used to validate the quality of calorimetric cement measurements in a laboratory. 

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