Rhode Island State Food Testing Laboratories Maintenance and Enhancement of ISO/IEC 17025 -2017 Accreditation

Rhode Island State Dept Of Health, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

Project Summary / Abstract for State of Rhode Island Maintenance and Enhancement of ISO/IEC 17025 Accreditation and Whole Genome Sequencing for State Food Testing Laboratories Competition A Application Project Summary/Abstract The Rhode Island State Health Laboratories (SHL) is the state food regulatory laboratory accredited to the ISO/IEC 17025:2017 laboratory standards for the FDA Manufactured Food Regulatory Program (MFRPS) provides laboratory support to the state and federal integrated food safety system under the Food Safety Modernization Act. The SHL will continue enhancing its food testing program and while maintaining its accreditation for both of its food microbiology and chemistry laboratories. The SHL seeks to increase the number of samples collected and tested for the MFRPS program by leveraging its longstanding partnership with the state?s food regulatory agency, the RIDOH Center for Food Protection to effectively improve the state?s sampling agreement for MFRPS. The SHL seeks to increase the laboratories? capacity to provide standardized food testing for the FDA while it maintains conformance with Standard Ten of the MFRPS through training of its scientists and continual systems improvement. SHL will also continue its longstanding partnership with the RIDOH Center for Acute Infectious Disease and Epidemiology to provide laboratory support during foodborne outbreak investigations and emergency response. The SHL will continue to communicate with regulatory laboratories in other states provide insight into how to sustain ISO 17025:2017 accreditation for food testing to achieve their own sustainability. The SHL will continue to implement and meet the electronic formatting requirements as they evolve from FDA for or from eLEXNET. The SHL will continue reporting all food sample test results to the FDA via the eLEXNET database. The SHL will continue its participation as a member of the Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) and a FDA Microbiology Cooperative Agreement Program (MCAP) laboratory.