Dear Stephen (and others), Many thanks for your reply(s). You say that "CPA will wish to speak for itself". Perhaps I didn't make it clear that the question was asked by me on behalf of CPA. CPA sometimes has to make decisions from scratch and therefore needs advice from the profession to get some idea of the views around. This was the point of the request for advice. We need to develop our policy on point of care testing and one of the suggestions that has been made to us is that of ensuring that in hospitals urine stick testing is treated in the same way as, for instance, blood gas analysers in the intensive care unit. Is it a responsibility that laboratory departments can take on? Is it something that is valuable to do? Do Hospitals recognise the activity as one which if uncontrolled may cause clinical errors? and if so are they willing to fund a mechanism for making it accreditable? These are the issues that my CPA committee must discuss before we decide one way or another whether to include these "analyses" in the spectrum of near-patient testing activities that we ask our inspectors to investigate.. Cheers, David. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%