EFI Members Directory - The European Federation for Immunogenetics Members Directory

Rules for External Proficiency Testing (EPT) exercises

Ciaran Dunne (Chairperson EPT Committee)

Today EPT is an extremely important and indeed mandatory part of the EFI accreditation process for Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics laboratories.

The three primary functions of the EFI EPT committee are:

Collects information on external proficiency testing schemes operational in European laboratories (affiliated to EFI) and works to ensure their homogeneity and comparability.
Presents proposals concerning the organisation of EPT schemes.
Provides help in setting up new national and regional EPT schemes by giving advice on organisational matters.

Mission statement

“Harmonisation of EPT for Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics within Europe with the primary objective of improving patient care”.

The EFI EPT Committee reflects activities covered by EFI Standards. Therefore, the EPT Committee is currently restricted to addressing issues related to Human Histocompatibility testing.

Update on EFI EPT issues (19/1/07)

The EFI EPT Committee met in Oslo 2006. Deborah Crowe (ASHI) joined the meeting.

A directory of EPT Organisers for EFI affiliated laboratories is now available in members section of the EFI website.
A letter was sent to all EPT Organisers in April 2006 requesting that they provide an annual Certificate of EPT performance to all EFI affiliated laboratories. The implementation date for this Certificate being 1st January 2007.
Istanbul began organising EPT for serology and 2 digit typing in November 2005. Sofia to introduce HLA antibody identification and HLA-B27 typing schemes for Region 8 (Balkans and Israel) laboratories.
EPT Regional Coordinators (2007)
- Region 1 – Scandinavia – John Vaage
- Region 2 – Benelux – Illias Doxiadis
- Region 3 – UK + Ireland - Susan Corbin
- Region 4 – Germany – Falko Heinemann
- Region 5 – Central Europe – Martin Petrek
- Region 6 + 11 – France + Switzerland – Chantal Gautreau
- Region 7 – Italy – Francesca Quintieri
- Region 8 – Balkans + Israel – Elissaveta Naumova
- Region 9 + 10 – Iberia – Guadelupe Ercilla
- Region 99 – South Africa – Ciaran Dunne
The function of the EPT Regional Coordinators is to liase with their respective Regional Commissioners to ensure conformance with the EPT Rules. EPT Coordinators shall advise and support EFI accredited laboratories, those laboratories actively seeking EFI accreditation and EPT Organisers to meet these rules.
For communication purposes it was agreed to encourage all EPT Schemes to adopt abbreviated titles such as ET, NEQAS, CET, Balkan EPT etc.
Rules for EPT Organisers and participating laboratories were updated from version 2 (Newsletter 46) to version 3 . The implementation date for version 3 being 1st January 2007.

For additional information/consultation contact Ciaran Dunne, Chairperson EFI EPT Committee (ciaran.dunne@ibts.ie).

EPT Downloads

The Committee for External Proficiency Testing has provided the following PDF documents covering the application and requirements for external proficiency testing.