management review

Management review is a structured evaluation by laboratory leadership of whether the management system remains suitable, effective, and aligned with service needs. It brings together information that individual departments may otherwise review separately, including audit findings, quality indicators, user feedback, nonconformities, risks, external assessment, staffing, resources, and progress on previous decisions.

The review is more than a meeting agenda or a presentation of statistics. Leadership should interpret the information, identify priorities, decide on changes, and allocate responsibilities and resources. Record the rationale for important decisions, intended outcomes, and follow-up arrangements. The format can suit the organization, provided required inputs and meaningful outputs are addressed. Track unfinished actions between reviews rather than waiting for the next formal meeting to discover that nothing happened.

For accreditation, management review demonstrates active leadership of quality and competence, rather than delegation of every issue to a quality officer. Assessors look for a connection between identified needs and concrete decisions. Evidence is stronger when resource requests, service risks, and improvement priorities lead to assigned actions whose completion and effectiveness are subsequently checked.