EURL-PH-AMR External Quality Assessment and Proficiency Testing

The European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network (EARS-Net) is the largest publicly funded system for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) surveillance in Europe. Data from EARS-Net play an important role in raising awareness at the political level, among public health officials, in the scientific community, and among the general public. DTU Food coordinates the annual external quality assessments (EQA) exercise to support national laboratories in their efforts to improve diagnostic accuracy.

The European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network (EARS-Net) performs surveillance of antimicrobial susceptibility of eight bacterial pathogens commonly causing infections in humans: Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Acinetobacter species, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Staphylococcus aureus, Enterococcus faecalis, and Enterococcus faecium.
The EARS-Net reporting protocol defines the panels of antimicrobial agent combinations under surveillance for each species. In addition, the EUCAST guidelines for the detection of resistance mechanisms and specific types of resistance of clinical and/or epidemiological importance explain the mechanisms of resistance and describe the recommended methods of detection for key species–antimicrobial group combinations. EARS-Net is administrated and coordinated by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).

EARS-Net external quality assessment (EQA)

The EURL-PH-AMR (DTU Food) coordinates annual external quality assessments (EQA) exercises to support clinical laboratories in their efforts to improve diagnostic accuracy. The overall scope of the EARS-Net EQA exercise is to

• assess the quality of species identification
• assess the accuracy of the interpretation of phenotypic antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) results
• evaluate the overall comparability of routinely collected AST results between European laboratories

Laboratories submitting EARS-Net Surveillance data to ECDC are eligible to participate in the EARS-Net EQA. Evaluation of submitted results are shared with the participating laboratories, a national summary report is shared with the National EARS-Net EQA Coordinator, and an EU/EEA summary report are published on the EURL-PH-AMR website.

DTU Food is accredited by DANAK under ISO/IEC 17043 (no. 516) to provide proficiency testing schemes for phenotypic EQA for EARS-Net and EURGen-Net, and under ISO/IEC 17025 (no. 350) to provide AST results (broth microdilution). All activities are conducted in accordance with documented quality assurance procedures, including the registration and assessment of complaints by the EARS-Net EQA team. Complaints can be submitted earsnet-eqa@food.dtu.dk.

Please go to the EARS-Net EQA website to find:

• 2026 EARS-Net EQA documents (protocol, Test forms)
• 2025 EARS-Net EQA protocol and expected results
• 2021-2024 EARS-Net EQA summary reports and protocols
• Guideline to get access and upload results to the web-based platform
• Guideline to reset the password for the EARS-Net webtool

Please find the plan for the 2026 EARS-Net EQA under Results.
 

Phenotypic external quality assessment (EQA) and genomic proficiency test (PT) exercise for laboratories participating in EURGen-Net

The overall scope of the EURGen-Net phenotypic external quality assessment (EQA) and genomic proficiency test (PT) is to support national reference laboratories in EURGen-Net in their efforts to improve and maintain the quality of species identification, the accuracy of the interpretation of antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) results, the quality of the whole genome sequencing (WGS) and the accuracy of the results obtained with bioinformatics analyses.

• 2025 EURGen-Net EQA Protocol final (pdf)
• EURGen-Net EQA 2025 test form Acinetobacter baumannii (pdf)
• EURGen-Net EQA 2025 test form Escherichia coli (pdf)
• EURGen-Net EQA 2025 test form Klebsiella pneumoniae (pdf)
• EURGen-Net EQA 2025 test form Pseudomonas aeruginosa (pdf)