External Quality Assessment in Clinical Laboratory

The series on external quality assessment we will see what is external quality assessment, advantages, principles and types of external quality assessment. Effective management of clinical laboratories participating in external quality assessment schemes (EQAS) is of fundamental importance in ensuring reliable analytical results. The International Standard ISO 15189:2012 requires participation in interlaboratory comparison [e.g. external quality assessment (EQA)] for all tests provided by an individual laboratory. If EQAS is not commercially available, alternative approaches should be identified, although clinical laboratories may find it challenging to choose the EQAS that comply with the international standards and approved guidelines. Great competence is therefore required, as well as knowledge of the characteristics and key elements affecting the reliability of an EQAS, and the analytical quality specifications stated in approved documents. Another skill of fundamental importance is the ability to identify an alternative approach when the available EQAS are inadequate or missing. Yet the choice of the right EQA program alone does not guarantee its effectiveness. In fact, the fundamental steps of analysis of the information provided in EQA reports and the ability to identify improvement actions to be undertaken call for the involvement of all laboratory staff playing a role in the specific activity. In this course I have also included the basic statistics use for interpretation of EQA reports. Review of EQA data and use of this data for overall quality improvement purpose. In this course, I have also discussed the troubleshooting of EQA outlier such as handling the unsatisfactory score in EQA sample