Accreditation of clinical laboratories aims at pushing quality of operation towards a level specified in international standards for laboratory medicine, mainly the EN-ISO 15189 [1]. A key issue is the requirement to specify the uncertainty in measurements according to another internationally agreed document, the JCGM "Guide to the expression of uncertainty in measurement", commonly known as GUM [2]. The concept of uncertainty has been met with some skepticism in the profession, due to the difficulties in identifying procedural sources of uncertainty. Ramamohan et al. [3] describe an approach to resolve this difficulty by a generally applicable method. Some background discussion of quality assessment in the laboratory may be justified before commenting on this approach.
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