SUPERBRAND ACADEMY 101

What is accreditation?

Accreditation involves the assessment of the competence and impartiality of an organization and the compliance of their work to nationally and internationally recognized standards or schemes, such as the ISO 15189 medical laboratory testing standard.

Accreditation is very specific to the activities it covers under the relevant standard; for example just because a laboratory is accredited for testing saliva swab samples for the presence of COVID-19 antigens, it does not necessarily mean it is also accredited for testing either other samples for COVID-19 antigens and/or saliva swabs for any other antigens.

The scope of the specific activities covered by accreditation are listed on the organization’s schedule of accreditation, which can be searched here.

What is certification?

Effectively, certification is the third-party confirmation via audit of an organization’s systems or products, whilst accreditation is independent third-party recognition that an organization has the competence and impartiality to perform specific technical activities such as certification, testing and inspection.

Just as end user organizations have to demonstrate their conformity with a set of criteria to a certification body in order to be certified, in turn certification bodies have to demonstrate their competence, impartiality and integrity to UKAS in order to be accredited. In other words, if certification bodies are ‘the checkers’ then UKAS’s role as the government-appointed National Accreditation Body is to ‘check the checkers’.

It follows that only certification bodies can refer to themselves as ‘accredited’, whereas the organizations successfully audited by certification bodies hold ‘certification’. If the certification body has been accredited by UKAS to audit that particular activity, then organizations successfully audited by that certification body hold ‘accredited certification’.