Han Weijing; Santy Deasy Siregar*, Ayu Tan Suyono
Abstract: The prevalence of laboratory errors is approximately 0.011%-0.7% in all test results. The laboratory is a key in-patient diagnosis. Therefore, this error rate may be significantly detrimental to patient care. Laboratories have spearheaded endeavours to improve patient safety by implementing a series of improvements such as analytical quality control programmes and expanding the automation of manual processes. All laboratories must have well-established systems capable of identifying and addressing quality failures. This entails a system-led approach that strives to highlight and rectify policy or weak procedural points instead of simply assigning blame. Quality failures can be categorised by cause (the stage at which the issue arose in the testing pathway) and graded on a five-point scale by severity. The severity grade indicates both the actual and potential (worst case scenario) impacts (‘A’ and ‘P’ scores) on the patients’ outcomes. Typically, the ‘A’ and ‘P’ scores are slanted towards low and high adverse impacts on patients, respectively. This further underlines the necessity for laboratories to be constantly vigilant. This implementation of this categorisation and grading system is straightforward and can be a beneficial tool for performance monitoring and evaluation.
[ FULL TEXT PDF 1-6 ] DOI: 10.30566/ijo-bs/2021.special.04
