Mexico: ICITAP Helps Facilitate Culture of Quality Within Forensic Community

On March 1, ICITAP-Mexico concluded a week-long course for accreditation experts, designed to present the fundamentals of ISO 17020 and 17025 accreditation standards. In this training, 80+ forensic experts, lab directors and quality assurance managers from 18 Mexican states, as well as ICITAP experts reviewed the basics of international accreditation and received the 2017 update to the ISO 17025 standard. During this week-long activity, ICITAP-Mexico’s Attaché addressed the lab directors on the need to extend their Quality Assurance Systems to include the other lab services offered, as well as those targeted for accreditation, to include the development of a Catalog of Services within the scope of each forensic discipline. The Culture of Quality demands that lab directors begin to bring all forensic services within their labs, whether assisted by ICITAP or not, ‘on the path to accreditation’.  Final remarks for the course by the participants were given as a summary by the Forensic Services Director for the State of Querétaro. The one-week training was delivered with the support of and in coordination with the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL).