Impartiality
Our testing is impartial. We report what we find. This page is about what stops us doing anything else.
Who signs a result
A result is entered by one person, reviewed by a second who may not be the person who entered it, and authorised by a third who may be neither of them. Releasing a result therefore takes three different people.
That is not a policy somebody can waive when a deadline is tight. It is a constraint in the database: a result whose reviewer is its author, or whose authoriser is its author or its reviewer, is refused when it is written, not flagged for somebody to notice later.
Who may close an investigation
Nobody involved in producing a result may close an investigation that names it. The person who raised it, the people who entered, reviewed or authorised the result, the analyst who ran the work and the person who set the run up are all barred, by the system rather than by a rule somebody remembers. Where we review whether a corrective action worked, the reviewer is somebody other than the person who owned it.
The bar is drawn from the record an investigation names — the result, the run or the control point it is about — so it is exactly as wide as that naming and no wider. Where an investigation names none of those, what keeps the closer independent is us, not the system.
What is recorded, and what cannot be unrecorded
Every release, amendment and recall of a report is written to an audit trail, and the record of who has opened a report in the client portal is written the same way. Neither can be updated or deleted afterwards — the database rejects the attempt outright. We can add to those records. We cannot change them.
An amended report says which revision it amends and replaces, so a superseded number cannot quietly become the current one. When a report is recalled, a notice goes to every recipient of the original we hold an address for, and anyone we could not notify is recorded as not notified rather than counted as told.
Commercial pressure
No commercial, financial or other pressure — from a client, from a supplier, or from within our own organisation — changes what we report.
We do not publish a statement here about how our people are compensated.
Risks to our impartiality
We identify risks to our impartiality on an ongoing basis and record each one on a controlled form, classified by whether it arises from our own activities, from our relationships, or from the relationships of our people, together with the mitigation and the person responsible for it. Staff are required to report any pressure that could compromise impartiality. Issues affecting impartiality are addressed at management meetings, and the quality system as a whole is reviewed once a year.
ISO/IEC 17025:2017 clauses 4.1.1 to 4.1.5: laboratory activities are undertaken impartially and structured to safeguard impartiality; the laboratory is responsible for the impartiality of its activities and does not allow commercial, financial or other pressure to compromise it; risks to impartiality are identified on an ongoing basis; and where a risk is identified, the laboratory demonstrates how it eliminates or minimises it.