This last year, 2019-2020, has been a particularly challenging one for CMPT. The departure of one of our technologists, Fion Yung, and the temporary absence of our Editor, Veronica Restelli in October 2019 put an extra burden on CMPT staff to deliver the services and fulfill existing engagements with our clients.
CMPT added Shadi Alami as a technologist to the staff in August 2019 and Issa McKinnon joined CMPT as administrative assistant in January 2020. Even with those additions, our coordinator, Esther Kwok, and senior technologist Caleb Lee, had to take on the editorial and web manager functions until our Editor returned in July 2020.
As part of our commitment to quality, CMPT was successfully audited by SAI Global in March 2020 and our Quality System was recognized as being in compliance with ISO 9001:2015 (Quality Management – Requirements) with no deficiencies.
In addition, in May 2020 we successfully completed our audit for compliance with the international standard ISO/ IEC 17043:2010 (Conformity assessment -General requirements for proficiency testing) under the authority of the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation (A2LA). We were found to have no major concerns but did have 6 deficiencies and 3 observations. All were addressed, and our accreditation certificate was received.
This year as part of our Strategic Quality Plan review, our Quality Policy was revised to strengthen our statement of commitment to our staff.
We refined several essential definitions including defining both our paper and video challenges as EQA measurement tools.
We clarified that we view all people of all professions working within the laboratories that we serve as our customers. We clarified that we seek the opinions of all our customers, and not only top management in our customer satisfaction surveys.
CMPT continues to provide high quality, clinically relevant samples to clinical laboratories, and water testing organizations and continues to seek opportunities to extend the scope of its services. In line with that, CMPT has started to work on samples for Food Microbiology as an extension of already existing programs.
Despite the difficulties faced with the changes in staff, our composite satisfaction score which measures our Client Satisfaction, was the highest recorded for CMPT.
It is the commitment of our staff and the processes put on place to ensure the quality of our products and services what made this possible.
You can read the complete Chairman’s annual report in our Annual Report published on our website: https://cmpt.ca/publications-newsletter/annual-report/
