QUALITY ASSURANCE IN CLINICAL LABORATORIES

By

VIDHYA. V

Asst. Professor

Department of MBA

Quality assurance in clinical laboratories is such an important issue because laboratory results are used to help in diagnosing, prescribing treatment and monitoring the progress of patient. Laboratory result must be reliable and laboratory quality control procedures and result must be documented. Laboratory workers have the ethical and legal responsibility to ensure the work performed in the laboratory is of the highest quality. This can be guaranteed by adherence to a comprehensive quality assurance program.

Medical laboratory services are essential in the diagnosis and assessment of the health of patients. Their services involve arrangements for requisition, patient preparation, and patient identification, collection of samples, transportation, storage, processing and examination of clinical samples, together with subsequent result validation, interpretation, reporting and advice. Medical laboratory services should therefore meet the needs of all patients, clinical personnel responsible for patient care and any other interested parties.

The laboratory’s aim is not only to provide accurate results, but to do on the right patient within a meaningful timeframe as regards clinical management, using appropriate laboratory procedures and with a respect for ethics, confidentiality and the safety of the patient.

A program of quality management or quality assurance should be in place to ensure quality throughout the total testing process, from ordering the test to entering the result on the patient chart. Processing the samples in the lab, the test procedures, and procedural control are parts of quality control. Quality Management is an enabler of quality and a core component of good clinical management. It is patient-focused, impartial, objective, and operates within a peer review model. To review if we have placed the QA policies in the right path we can compare our process with NABL standards and check accordingly. Any lab can obtain NABL certification irrespectively if it is connected to the hospital or not. NABL is the constituent body of Quality Council of India. Accreditation is done at regular intervals to ensure maintenance of standards and reliability of results generated to support clinical and public health activities by the laboratories. The accreditation process requires: a) Identification of an authoritative body b) Adoption of standards, and c) Institution of a mechanism of assessment of laboratories to certify their compliance with standards.

As it is rightly said “Do the thing right from the first” the quality reports will be generated only if the laboratories are in good quality phase. As the lab reports are the integral part of patients diagnosis it becomes a cause of concern to upgrade our laboratories and switch to recent technologies.