EQAS: Experience, Challenges and Trouble Shooting as a Participating Laboratory in Public Sector

Shahla Shafique, M Sinha, A Das

Abstract: Introduction: Quality assurance (QA) is an indispensible part of medical laboratory processes for systemic monitoring of operation in clinical laboratory. It consists of internal quality control (IQC) and external quality assessment scheme (EQAS). Quality assurance incudes all the three phases of laboratory system that is pre analytical, analytical and post analytical. It takes into consideration the overall program related to a laboratory and thus ensures that the final report/result released by the laboratory are correct. Quality control is a process through which a laboratory ensures that, it's products quality is maintained or improved and manufacturing errors are reduced or eliminated. Quality control refers to the measures that must be included during each test run to verify that the test is working properly. Quality control emphasis statistical and non-statistical procedures and is able to detect the problem early enough to prevent their consequences. Objective: Data was collected from EQAS samples received from January 2016 to April 2018 at the Clinical Biochemistry Laboratory of Janakpuri Superspeciality Hospital (An autonomous organization under Delhi government), New Delhi, India for the study. The main purpose of EQA, beside monitoring and documenting the analytical quality is to identify poor performance to detect analytical errors, and to take corrective actions for the same. Methods: Four lyophilized samples received on quarterly basis that were stored at required optimum temperature, reconstituted and analyzed as per instruction and guidelines provided by the EQAS organizing body. Every month an unknown/blind sample provided by Christian Medical College, Vellore is reconstituted as per instruction on schedule date, analyzed for the number of parameters for which our laboratory is participating. The results obtained for every particular parameter is uploaded on the official website of CMC, Vellore on or before the schedule date as per the protocol. Our performance score was downloaded after completion of each month. The tests were performed on the fully automated biochemistry analyzer Erba Transasia XL 1000. Results: On analyzing, the monthly VIS of all the selected parameters for the study year 2016 - 2018 the laboratory's performance was found to be very good as (VIS 200 in the month of February, March and July in the year 2017, the possible reason being quality of water supply in the institute.

Keywords: Quality assurance QA, Internal quality control IQC, External quality assessment scheme EQAS,

How to Cite?: Shahla Shafique, M Sinha, A Das, "EQAS: Experience, Challenges and Trouble Shooting as a Participating Laboratory in Public Sector", Volume 8 Issue 3, March 2019, International Journal of Science and Research (IJSR), Pages: 1692-1696, https://www.ijsr.net/getabstract.php?paperid=ART20196576, DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.21275/ART20196576

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