Vaughn Agricultural Research Services Ltd. (VARS)

GLP has become an important part of the way we operate at VARS. By GLP, we refer to compliance with the United States Environmental Protection Agency's FIFRA (40 CFR Part 160) Good Laboratory Practice Standards and the OECD guidelines.

GLP improves the quality, reliability, and reproducibility of the research work. Our first activity with any newly acquired staff is to train them in the practices and procedures of this system. We maintain a master schedule to balance work load with the resources available.

We welcome quality assurance audits from sponsor companies in connection with requested work and we appreciate their suggestions for improvement.

Our QA unit maintains the master schedule and conducts in-phase audits during our field experiments. QA inspections may include, but are not limited to, facility and study plan audits, application or sampling phase inspections, raw data, and final report audits. Many sponsors find it more economical to use our QA rather than to send auditors from distant locations. The QA unit conducts regular VARS facility audits to maintain a compliant program.

We have participated in various Society of Quality Assurance workshops. In Canada, we have sponsored GLP training seminars for clients, analytical laboratory staff, and other contract researchers. Temporary staff are trained at the beginning of each season at a company sponsored seminar, followed by a thorough review of our current set of Standard Operating Procedures. All training records are available for QA inspection.

We choose only people who have the proper education, training, and experience to perform all assigned duties, whether performing or supervising studies. We ensure each person has a C.V., job description, and training record on file.

SOPs are a requirement in any compliant facility. Our SOPs have been developed since our inception and are available for QA inspection. We find that SOPs benefit our organization in many ways beyond meeting GLP compliance; they help us to do better research.

SOPs outline the critical aspects of a procedure and help to assure that these aspects are appropriately emphasized during procedure implementation.
SOPs help to assure consistency among individuals who are performing a procedure.
SOPs can help assure that approriate documentation and data collection occur by outlining the records to be generated during the performance of a procedure.

VARS works with GLP compliant analytical laboratories in Canada and the United States. We can arrange for analysis at these facilities as part of our project management service.

All archived materials are kept in a locked, water-proof, fire-proof filing cabinet. We keep an access log in the archive filing cabinet. A designated archivist maintains this fully indexed archive.