Does a drug testing center need to be licensed and accredited by the DOH before it can operate?

Licensing and accreditation sit with the DOH

The Comprehensive Dangerous Drugs Act answers this directly: the DOH shall be tasked to license and accredit drug testing centers in each province and city in order to assure their capacity, competence, integrity and stability to conduct the laboratory examinations and tests. Two distinct ideas sit in that sentence — a licence and an accreditation — and both run through the Department of Health. The law's stated purpose is quality control: drug test results carry heavy consequences for employment, licensing and criminal cases, so the laboratories producing them must be vetted for competence and integrity before they operate.

The physicians are accredited too

The section does not stop at the laboratory. The DOH shall also accredit physicians who shall conduct the drug dependency examination of a drug dependent as well as the after-care and follow-up program for the said drug dependent. Drug dependency examination — the clinical assessment of whether a person is drug dependent — is therefore not something any doctor may simply take on; the examining physician needs DOH accreditation, and the same goes for the after-care and follow-up side of treatment. A dedicated division under the DOH's supervision handles control regulations, licensing and accreditation.

Government testing centers are part of the design

The law also obliges the State to provide capacity of its own: the DOH shall establish, operate and maintain drug testing centers in government hospitals, which must be equipped with at least basic technologically advanced equipment and staffed with qualified and duly trained technical personnel. Accreditation, in other words, is not merely a gate imposed on private laboratories — the statute pairs the regulatory function with a duty to make properly equipped government testing available in the first place.

What this means in practice

If you operate or plan to operate a testing center, DOH licensing and accreditation is the threshold to clear before anything else, and the DOH is the agency to deal with on requirements. If you are on the receiving end of a drug test result — as an employee, an applicant or an accused — the laboratory's accreditation status is one of the first things worth checking, since the statute makes accreditation the guarantee of the laboratory's capacity, competence, integrity and stability. A result from an unaccredited operation invites exactly the challenge the licensing regime exists to prevent.

Related provisions

• RA 9165, Section 39 — Accrediting Testing Centers