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

Project Summary / Abstract for State of Rhode Island Maintenance and Enhancement ofISO/IEC 17025 Accreditation and Whole Genome Sequencing for State Food TestingLaboratories Competition A ApplicationProject Summary/AbstractThe Rhode Island State Health Laboratories (SHL) is the state food regulatory laboratoryaccredited to the ISO/IEC 17025:2017 laboratory standards for the FDA ManufacturedFood Regulatory Program (MFRPS) provides laboratory support to the state and federalintegrated food safety system under the Food Safety Modernization Act. The SHL willcontinue enhancing its food testing program and while maintaining its accreditation forboth of its food microbiology and chemistry laboratories. The SHL seeks to increase thenumber of samples collected and tested for the MFRPS program by leveraging itslongstanding partnership with the state?s food regulatory agency, the RIDOH Center forFood Protection to effectively improve the state?s sampling agreement for MFRPS. TheSHL seeks to increase the laboratories? capacity to provide standardized food testing forthe FDA while it maintains conformance with Standard Ten of the MFRPS throughtraining of its scientists and continual systems improvement. SHL will also continue itslongstanding partnership with the RIDOH Center for Acute Infectious Disease andEpidemiology to provide laboratory support during foodborne outbreak investigationsand emergency response. The SHL will continue to communicate with regulatorylaboratories in other states provide insight into how to sustain ISO 17025:2017accreditation for food testing to achieve their own sustainability. The SHL will continueto implement and meet the electronic formatting requirements as they evolve from FDAfor or from eLEXNET. The SHL will continue reporting all food sample test results tothe FDA via the eLEXNET database. The SHL will continue its participation as amember of the Food Emergency Response Network (FERN) and a FDA MicrobiologyCooperative Agreement Program (MCAP) laboratory.