As the name implies, a secondary standard is used by standard laboratories, which include companies involved in the preparation of reagents and kits, as well as laboratories responsible to produce quality control material for use by other laboratories. They use the primary standard as the primary calibrator or primary reference material, and they calibrate their instruments against it. Smaller labs use secondary standards to calibrate control material for analysis of unknown concentrations. For smaller labs, secondary standard serves as an external quality control. As a result, it is essential that the secondary standard be standardized against the primary standard before it can be applied.
