Explains how the principles of quality assurance can be applied to health laboratory services in order to ensure consistently high quality performance and reliable test results. Noting that reliability depends on far more than the correct performance of tests, the book offers comprehensive information on the full range of factors that can cause errors at the pre-analytical, analytical, and post-analytical stages. Laboratory managers and technologists receive detailed advice on methods for determining the clinical usefulness of specific tests, correct procedures for patient preparation, sampling, specimen handling, preservation, storage, transport, identification, and data processing. Throughout the book, charts, tables, diagrams and checklists are used to alert readers to common errors and the techniques that can help prevent them. The manual has seven chapters. The first, devoted to quality control at the pre-analytical stage, opens with an outline of biological sources of variation that can influence test results, followed by a detailed guide to sources of error during the collection, transport, and storage of blood specimens, pleural, peritoneal, and cerebrospinal fluid, throat swabs, sputum, urine, sexually transmitted disease specimens, and stools. The second and most extensive chapter serves as a step-by-step guide to the correct performance of over 60 specific analytical tests and quality control procedures in the areas of clinical chemistry, haematology, clinical microbiology, serology, and medical parasitology. Procedures and tests are suitable for peripheral laboratories and for district laboratories with limited technical and economic resources. While noting that all methods have limitations, the chapter emphasizes the ways in which adherence to certain practical rules can reduce errors in routine daily work, avoid misinterpretation of results, and aid the quick identification of cause in cases of obvious failure. Other chapters outline the correct procedures for data handling and data processing at each stage from receipt of the specimen to the final laboratory report, and offer general advice on the organization and management of a health laboratory. The fifth chapter, on laboratory equipment, sets out detailed guidelines for the safe use and routine maintenance of twelve categories of laboratory equipment, ranging from automated cell counters and centrifuges to microscopes, pipettes, and test tubes. The book concludes with advice on the essential safety precautions needed to protect staff from physical and chemical hazards, followed by a brief overview of external quality assurance programmes.

eng.

per.

WHODOC

WHO monograph

4