The European Centre for Laboratory Excellence
The European Centre for Laboratory Excellence (EC4LE) was established by the Croatian Metrology Society, a non-profitable, non-governmental organisation which deals with metrology, testing and technical regulations. For the past 25 years the Croatian Metrology Society has been actively involved in training of laboratory personnel. Until March 2025 with the European Centre for Laboratory Excellence it organised more than 500 courses.
Because of its rich experience in organising training, the Croatian Metrology Society was asked to join a European Leonardo da Vinci Partnership project entitled Enhancing Hospital Laboratory Standards for CPD: A Quality Improvement Toolkit (2013-1-GB2-LEO04-10984 2). Along with Partners from the United Kingdom, Malta, Czech Republic and Hungary an EU-toolkit was developed for the delivery of high quality Continuing Professional Development activities, which contains plenty of examples (more on the Project: www.enhanceit.eu).
Repeated requests to organise its courses in English, stimulated the Croatian Metrology Society to establish the European Centre for Laboratory Excellence in 2015 to act as a pan-European provider of training via its own training catalogue of courses offered in English (see Training catalogue below).
EC4LE also received a licence from the European Commission JRC to act as what is called an Authorised Event Organiser for TrainMiC®, a training programme which was created in 2001. In this capacity, EC4LE offers logistic services to TrainMiC® authorised trainers and TrainMiC® country teams across Europe. This can be useful to facilitate the setting-up of training events in a country, even with training in the local language.
With TrainMiC® running under the auspices of the European Commission, EC4LE’s brand is strong and tightly linked to the success of TrainMiC® to date i.e. a massive multiplication effect with more than 330 courses having been provided to more than 10000 participants and close to 200 trainers have been authorised. Trainers can make use of the high quality harmonised training materials and combine it with their own experience and knowledge.
EC4LE can call on a pool of experienced trainers and has collaborated in several international projects (e.g. Leonardo Da Vinci).
From 2018 EC4LE has been collaborating in organising courses in English for laboratory personnel with other european training providers in the same field.
Training Catalogue of EC4LE
- Application of ISO/IEC 17025
- Validation and verification of analytical measurement procedures and relevant statistical tools
- Measurement uncertainty for practitioners
- Quality control and proficiency testing
- Risk management
- Internal audits in laboratories
- Sampling as a laboratory activity
- Method verification in food and water microbiology
- Measurement uncertainty in food and water microbiology
- Temperature measurement in ISO/IEC 17025 laboratories