Emerging issues in regulations and standards: Sampling considerations within market surveillance actions

Form the 1^st of January 2010, the so called New Legal Framework on accreditation and market surveillance will be mandory in EU countries. This means in practice that for the market surveillance field, the member state authorities have to develop National Marker Surveillance Programmes and this in co-operation with other member states and the EC. This paper is dealing with an important issue when it comes to assess the products on the national market namely sampling. Inadequate sampling might lead to onerous results but also high costs. Two sampling methods are compared based on the ISO 2859-1 standard. Issues like statistics (sampling) are addressed but also definition of critical requirements, measurement uncertainty, risk assessment and visibility aspects. Finally the paper proposes a model to integrate these evolving issues.