Improvement of Clinical Laboratory Services through Quality

Health care providers need test results that are relevant, accurate, and reliable for patient care. The term “quality control” is used to describe the set of procedures used to check that the results of laboratory tests are reliable for the intended clinical use. A laboratory might produce results that are considered unsatisfactory. While the cause for this might be immediately apparent, the identification of the underlying problem is neither always straightforward, nor easy because many factors can affect result quality. Internal quality control (IQC) and external quality assessment (EQA) are two distinct but complementary components of a laboratory quality improvement program. IQC ensures day-to-day laboratory consistency. EQA permits the identification of poor individual laboratory performance, as well as the detection of reagents, instruments and methods that produce unreliable or misleading results, by means of a retrospective analysis of data obtained by participating laboratories. Continuous participation in EQA schemes has been linked to improved laboratory performance.