Abstract

RODRIGUEZ BERTHEAU, Andrea M et al. External quality assessment in Haematology. Rev Cubana Invest Bioméd [online]. 2013, vol.32, n.1, pp. 111-120. ISSN 0864-0300.

External quality assessment allows us to determine the performance of individual laboratories to make trials or take specific measurements and identify the specific problems in them. The need to establish a cheap and reliable methodology for the external evaluation of the quality of some of some haematological variables of laboratories encouraged us to carry out this work. In this methodology, we define three stages: a) training, b) external control of a spectrophotometer technique, haemoglobin concentrations and microscopy, total leukocyte count that allowed us to assess the work of the haematology section, c) feedback of results and an in situ inspection to the ones that obtained deficient results to apply correction measures. The laboratory professionals were trained and informed on the procedures. The external evaluation was applied to the laboratories of four municipalities of Havana and the variables were standardized. Of the nine laboratories tested on haemoglobin concentration we had the following results: five of them obtained excellent marks, one was marked good and the other three were marked satisfactory. In relation to the total leukocyte count, two of them were marked excellent, three were marked good, one was considered satisfactory and the remaining three were not reported. The latter laboratories were visited and the problems were identified. The inter-laboratory rates of variation were calculated for group two with six laboratories. The result of haemoglobin was 2.05%, for a total leukocytes count of 9.93%. The implemented methodology requires fewer resources than the internationally recommended form and allows the differentiation of laboratories in terms of both accuracy and precision.

Keywords : External evaluation; laboratory quality; haematology.

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