The UK’s official accreditation body, UKAS, has re-accredited a disgraced blood testing lab despite years of widespread testing scandals.
Synnovis Analytics is accredited by UKAS to ISO 15189, a standard for medical testing laboratories. However, the lab has admitted to incorrect testing since at least 2021, and now faces far more serious allegations. From The Daily Mail:
Thousands of NHS patients could be being wrongly diagnosed with health conditions due to inaccurate and misleading blood test results, an alarming investigation has found. Synnovis, a blood analyst provider for almost 200 GP surgeries and six hospitals in London, is failing to deliver accurate results ‘on a daily basis’, medics say.
Dozens of emails sent by the firm, who makes £2 billion from the NHS, show it has repeatedly apologised to GPs since 2021 for incorrect test results relating to diseases including diabetes and malaria. Doctors claim it is now ‘an everyday concern’ for them, with the problem ‘nothing short of a national scandal’.
According to additional reporting by the BBC:
A range of claims has been made by the 14 GPs we have heard from – who all wanted to remain anonymous for professional reasons.
One GP told the BBC that the increased workload resulting from having to assess and then escalate unreliable results was leading to “increased burnout and people wanting to leave the profession”.
Several GPs told of recent instances where they were unable to do timely diabetes tests for patients because of Synnovis delays.
Despite this, UKAS reissued its accreditation to Synnovis on April 3, 2025.
Accreditation bodies like UKAS and ANAB have refused to deny accreditation to laboratories that pay for their audit services, even after the labs are under criminal investigations for fraud or data falsification. The bodies are subject to oversight by the AIF sister organization, ILAC, which has refused to step in and force UKAS and ANAB to uphold their responsibilities and deny such accreditations.
IAF and ILAC are set to merge into a single accreditation entity, GLOBAC, in the coming months.
The UK government has promised to look into the actions of UKAS but has failed to do so so far.
