Medical laboratory services are essential to patient care as laboratory results influence 70% of diagnosis. When tests are performed, there is always some level of inaccuracy. The challenge is to reduce the level of inaccuracy as much as possible. In orders to reduce these errors throughout the lab testing cycle, it is very important to maintain the quality of diagnostic lab. For this purpose standards should be set in the laboratory. These standards have the general requirement for effective management and competent testing.
In this study 5 public and 4 private sector medical diagnostic labs in district Lahore were selected. Permission from the competent authorities was taken and information was gathered through questionnaire including parameters such as lab building design, human resource of the lab, equipment and consumables, quality control measures adopted in the labs, environmental monitoring, waste management and customer care covering factors like recruitment policy of staff, Job descriptions of the staff, trainings conducted in the lab, SOPs, quality control and quality assurance program, feedback system, corrective and preventive action implemented in lab, result reporting etc.
The data was analyzed statistically through frequency distribution by using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 18.0 for development of Graphs and Tables.
This study was conducted to help to evaluate the quality system of medical diagnostic labs and to identify the critical points which affect the quality of the testing and diagnosis and are being ignored. Information regarding different parameters was summarized in tabulated form by calculating percentage values. Two types of comparison were done. Firstly percentage value for each lab is calculated to check which labs fulfill maximum requirements of the parameters described. Second comparison was done to find out the percentage of the labs out of total selected labs, which fulfill different factors of the parameters described. After statistical analysis using chi square results showed that there is no significant difference between private sector labs and public sector labs.
In the first parameter, lab building design lab 1 and lab 9 got 100% quality points and lab 6 and lab 8 got minimum scores of 20%. In second parameter, human resource of lab 1, 2 and 3 got 100% quality points. Lab 6 and 8 got minimum quality points of 33%. When third parameter equipment and consumables was investigated it was found that lab 7 and lab 9 100% fulfill this parameter and lab 6 and lab 8 fulfill this parameter only 16.6%. In fourth parameter, quality control practices implemented in labs; lab 2 got 86% scores and lab 1 got 82% while lab 8 got minimum quality points of 22%. In fifth parameter, waste management of the lab; lab 4 got maximum quality points of 83% and all other labs got the same score of 66.6% in this parameter. When sixth parameter, environmental monitoring was investigated. It was found that lab 2 and lab 9 monitor the environment of the lab only 66.6% and in lab 8 environmental monitoring is not done. In seventh parameter, customer care lab 9 got 100% scores and labs 3, 4, 5 and 6 got 50% scores.
Conclusion:
Results show that there is no significant difference between government and private sector labs. Labs do not pay attention to the quality control measures and use same approaches of quality control in their system.