International Effort Devoted to Raising the Quality of Medical Laboratory Services in Africa
To help improve the quality and accuracy of clinical pathology laboratory testing, many African nations are using ISO 15189 for laboratory accreditation
In many developing countries, both patients and medical laboratory professionals are making local headlines with their efforts to call attention the unacceptable number of errors made by clinical laboratories in their respective countries. This media scrutiny is a positive sign because problems must be recognized and acknowledged before they can be solved.
In recent weeks, Dark Daily published an ebriefing that described how pathologists and clinical laboratory professionals in Africa and the Caribbean were calling attention to unacceptably high rates of medical lab testing errors in their respective regions. (See Dark Daily: Public Outcry Over Inaccurate Medical Laboratory Test Results and Misdiagnoses Spurs Government Action in Developing Countries.)
The good news is that media reports about problems with medical laboratory testing quality in these developing countries have encouraged an organized international response. Medical laboratory professionals from developed nations are providing financing, equipment, onsite training and supervision specifically to raise the quality and accuracy of medical laboratory test results in many of these developing countries.
International collaborations aimed at building high-quality clinical laboratory services in developing countries are paying off. In some cases, this is directly related to the efforts of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and similar initiatives to improve the quality of clinical laboratory services in these resource-limited regions to support better disease detection and patient care. (more…)
