Matthew Pitt confirmed as provisional evaluator for APAC
- Author: JASANZ
Congratulations to Matthew Pitt, our JASANZ Technical Manager who was recently been confirmed as a provisional evaluator for APAC, following the completion of his training in Singapore earlier this year!
Matt (MPH; BBiotechnology [Hons]), a regulatory toxicologist and occupational hygienist with over 15 years experience advising government, and joined JASANZ in 2016 as the first Health & Human Services Sector Manager overseeing more than 20 schemes. During this time he helped the Australian Department of Social Services develop the NDIS Approved Quality Auditor Scheme on a secondment, and secured sole rights of JASANZ to be the only accreditation body recognised for certification body accreditation under the NDIS Act 2013.
Looking back on this formative time, Matt said, “Being part of a long-term, historically significant reform movement led by people with disability, friends, family and advocates has been a highlight of my career so far. It was a unique ‘big-picture’ opportunity to help combine legislation, conformity assessment, and social policy to improve the situation of a historically neglected and abused cohort of people. It was a matter of JASANZ being present and on the minds of the relevant stakeholders as a result of over 20 years of solid contributions in scheme development and accreditation services related to supports and services for people with disability. Senior Executives, assessors and technical experts involved in these formative early schemes are still active with JASANZ, and together we presented to key stakeholders a credible, authoritative, experienced offering for accreditation services to support the broader policy objectives of the NDIS.”
In late 2018, Matt became the JASANZ Business Development Manager, and in early 2021, he was appointed to his current position as Technical Manager. In these roles he has developed several new public certification schemes as a fee-for-service activity.
We asked Matt a few questions about his time at JASANZ.
Why did you join JASANZ?
I had been working in Government conformity assessment activities, chemicals and then medical devices, and also operating a national cancer patient advocacy group, Brain Tumour Alliance Australia for almost ten years. I saw the role with JASANZ as a unique opportunity to combine several of my skills and better-blend the two polar worlds I operated in – Government Regulation and charities, while retaining a focus on conformity assessment for ‘quality’.
What do you like about working at JASANZ?
The variety of work! Accreditation is inherently an multidisciplinary activity by default. This is appealing to me after working in health systems advocacy and seeing disciplinary silos continue to exist despite everyone’s efforts to break them down. I think in retrospect accreditation and its foundations in conformity assessment are an underappreciated or more generally –unknown – framework that many domain-specific professionals could benefit from engaging with. Even it is just a simple activity as taking a look at an international or AS, NZS standard on a given activity, and seeing how it compares to existing practices.
However standards and scheme documents are often dry material even to enthusiasts, and so the other thing I like about JASANZ is the passion of scheme owners, auditors, assessors, technical experts, and industry groups to bring a problem or subject matter ‘to life’. This often is most apparent in audits and assessments – these can be stressful for everyone – but they are so for a fundamentally important reason. This is where most of the outputs of schemes, auditing, and assessments are realised; The culmination, if you will. We are not writing and discussing existential philosophical texts in accreditation, although that would be fun too. We are talking people’s livelihoods (profitability/firm survival) and safety, the environment and resources, and the effective functions of our most important services and products. Ultimately we are talking economic productivity, which grows the ‘pie’ available for environmental stewardship, education, health, and other fundamental social goods.
The other really nice thing about JASANZ is the international ethos of accreditation, and its worthy aim to roll-across the best thinking for a given problem around the world as quickly and effectively as possible, while still allowing regional / domain-specific contextualisation. On the latter point, despite popular misconception, we are not the Borg, and resistance (and outright rejection) of our methods is possible. Just let us know, we can handle it! We are not capable of being the solution to all problems, and we don’t seek to present to be.
What has been your greatest accomplishment at JASANZ during this time?
Apart from work supporting the NDIS, I think it would be helping to codify an objective set of criteria and processes for developing and endorsing conformity assessment schemes through scheme endorsement criteria. Others would probably disagree! (heh heh). This involved looking back over 30 years of JASANZ practices, and talking to current colleagues and former personnel, to gauge the reasons and logic behind why (and why not) Australia and New Zealand’s accreditation body for everything except laboratory inspection and accreditation, and proficiency testing, has become involved in schemes historically. It also involved talking with international peer accreditation bodies, and ultimately trying to comply with our own requirements as an accreditation body, articulated in IAF Mandatory Document 25. Yes, we accreditation bodies also have requirements ultimately written by others that we must comply with!
What has been your greatest challenge?
part from my ignorance of the history, cultures, and New Zealand – which I work every day on as a simple Aussie to address – the greatest challenge is probably related to the above accomplishment; Helping to answer the questions of what is a good conformity assessment scheme? Is this a scheme we ‘should’ be involved in? The problem is similar to the perennially one of ‘good policy’ or ‘good regulation’, which are considerable challenges, except in some ways it is harder due to the sheer diversity of potential conformity assessment schemes. This causes epistemological challenges, for example: How to best demonstrate to others that the ‘object of conformity’ conforms to a requirement[s]? What knowledge is needed, and how will we know? But the hardest of all are the anthropological challenges, due to different disciplines and stakeholder groups needed for the operation and benefits of a third party conformity assessment scheme. In fact anthropology, is probably the most useful discipline for understanding accreditation!
What does it mean to be a provisional evaluator for APAC and why did you want to pursue this?
It’s a much-welcome continuation of a long involvement in international work with passionate colleagues and leaders. From: Trying to promote early uptake of leading neuro-oncology practices into Australia through partnerships with clinicians, industry and patients around the world; Leading chemical assessment teams with the US EPA on new agricultural/veterinary chemical assessments; To working with IMDRF regulatory partners in medical device conformity assessment, contributing to the overall activities of a global network of expertise on a given topic is one of the greatest feelings in auditing / assessment, at least in my biased opinion.
My APAC Provisional Evaluator Scopes also includes medical device conformity assessment. With all the historical challenges in medical device safety and quality, I’m keen to contribute to the never-ending need to improve the design, manufacture and use of medical devices. People’s lives depend upon this.
What’s next for you?
Good question! There’s always new opportunities, new problems to address, and new tools to use. Reading the international standards will guide you to this conclusion!
More specifically, I would like to have even a small part in accreditation’s next steps into the ‘AI’ age, which I guess is a bit of a clichéd and cheesy aim. But the use of Large Language Models such as Generative Pre-trained Transformers, together with more interactive forms of stakeholder consultation on virtual / online platforms, poses some fairly enticing prospects for better addressing the universal problems discussed by the Ancient Greeks (and societies before and after them): What do we believe to be true? What are our problems? What ought to be done?
Used wisely, we may be entering a golden age of schemes and standards, where artificial intelligence helps us all operate sophisticated management systems, processes, product design and manufacturing. Scheme Owners and the rest of us will have little guides that can help us 24×7 to engage with schemes, legislation, and the tens of thousands of complex standards and specifications, and make them more efficiently work for our situation, including the complicated act of selecting the best products or services to buy.