Aritri Bir, Arindam Ghosh, Sulekha Sinha, Arindom Banerjee
BACKGROUND In clinical laboratories, establishment and monitoring of multiple Quality Indicators in preanalytical phase to cut down the error rate has a promising role in Quality Assurance. MATERIALS AND METHODS The total pathway of preanalytical phase was traced to evaluate various Quality Indicators already established by International Federation of Clinical Chemistry (IFCC) and Laboratory Medicine Working Group on Laboratory Errors and Patient Safety (WG- LEPS), among them, we monitored QI-5 (Requests with errors concerning patient identification), QI-7 (Requests with errors concerning test input), QI-8 (Samples lost-not received), QI-9 (Samples collected in inappropriate container), QI-10 (Haemolysed samples), QI-12 (Samples with insufficient sample volume) and QI-15 (Improperly labelled samples). RESULTS During 1 year of study period, a total no of 108000 samples were received in the Clinical Biochemistry laboratory. Total preanalytical errors recorded was 277 (0.25% of the total number of samples). Among them, patient identification error was 11.1%, missing test inputs was 4.3%, 49% were haemolysed, 10.1% were not received in the laboratory, 5% were collected in wrong container, 11.9% samples showed inadequate sample to anticoagulant ratio and 8.3% of samples were improperly labelled. The results were compared with specifications of IFCC (WG-LEPS). All the evaluated QIs were found to be within optimal level. Sigma values also were within acceptable range. CONCLUSION The performance in preanalytical phase of our laboratory was found favourable and complies with international quality specifications.
