Participation in internal and external quality assurance systems is a useful tool for production of reliable laboratory results of consistently good quality.
Descriptions of the EQAS
The National Food Institute, a WHO Collaborating Centre has in a number of years been responsible for conducting the WHO GFN EQAS for Salmonella serotyping and antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST).
Laboratories are requested to test the bacterial strains by the methods routinely used and the results should then be submitted to DTU Food through a webtool (password-protected) which upon deadline will generate an evaluation report.
Final summary reports of previously conducted EQAS are available for download below..
Various aspects of the proficiency test scheme may from time to time be subcontracted. When subcontracting occurs it is placed with a competent subcontractor and the National Food Institute is responsible to the scheme participants for the subcontractor's work.
Currently, though, as funding resources are not available to cover for the continuation of the current setup, we are working on renewing the concept. We wish to strengthen the focus on quality assurance of surveillance data and consequently allow all officially appointed reference laboratories submitting monitoring data to WHO (Global Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System (GLASS)) or FAO (FAO Assessment Tool for Laboratories and AMR Surveillance Systems (FAO-ATLASS)).
When the setup has been finally decided, we will update the above description to present the re-defined EQAS.