Did you know that today – Thursday 12th November – is World Quality Day? World Quality Day shines the spotlight on all the valuable work undertaken by quality professionals across a wide variety of industries and organisations. The theme of this year’s celebration is ‘delivering customer value’.
At Lextox quality underpins everything we do, this blog aims to explain what quality means at Lextox, the importance of quality and the steps Lextox takes to ensure it.
Quality – Quality is the degree of excellence of a product or service. At Lextox we aim to provide an excellent service from beginning to end in order to provide you with reliable results. We do this by working to right first time quality assurance procedures to minimise delays and ensure reliability.
UKAS – The United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS) is the sole national accreditation body recognised by government to assess, against internationally agreed standards, organisations that provide certification, testing, inspection and calibration services. UKAS accreditation demonstrates a laboratory’s competency in testing to ensure reliability of the analysis results and delivers confidence in the service of the testing laboratory. For more information about the importance of UKAS accreditation visit www.ukas.com.
Accreditation – Lextox is accredited by UKAS to test for a wide range of drugs in hair and was, at the time, the first independent UK owned laboratory to attain ISO 17025 UKAS accreditation (No. 7516) for hair alcohol testing. We’re proud to have maintained our ISO 17025 accreditation for 9 successive years. Our schedule of accreditation can be viewed here.
Leadership – At Lextox every member of our team is responsible for quality. This starts with the Lextox management and quality team who lead by example – ensuring quality is part of everyday tasks and that there is an ongoing commitment to quality. The importance of quality is instilled on all members of staff who demonstrate their commitment to quality through on-going competency training and continual development.
Improvement – We are continuingly assessing our processes and procedures to ensure that they are of high quality, efficient and add value for our clients. Our team are encouraged to suggest improvements to ensure the continual development of the company, which in turn delivers value for our clients. We also ask for feedback directly from our clients, over the last 9 years this feedback has helped Lextox further improve existing services, for example evolving our Expert Reports to ensure clarity of the interpretations, as well as launching new tests and methods to meet changing market requirements.
Team – Lextox is the preferred choice for many clients based on the quality of our people and the relationships they have built with our team. This extends from our Sample Collectors, who are trained to collect samples accurately, sensitively and sympathetically, to our office and laboratory staff. We pride ourselves on recruiting and retaining the very best people to deliver a responsive service and reliable results.
Yearly – At Lextox we are audited by UKAS every year to ensure that the whole organisation is continuing to meet quality standards. In between, we carry out internal audits on our processes and procedures and also invite qualified external auditors to review and make recommendations.
For more information on our testing services contact our Client Support team, call 029 2048 4141 or email [email protected].
Published 12/11/20 – All information correct at time of publication