Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
More evidence of pre-analytical error rates, this time for the Journal of Clinical Pathology. This is from a study back in 2010, my apologies for only finding it this year:
A Six Sigma approach to the rate and clinical effect of registration error in a laboratory, Naadira Vanker, Johan van Wyk, Annalise E. Zemlin, Rajiv T Erasmus, J Clin Pathol 2010:63:434-437.
In this study, they reviewed 47,543 test request forms from a 3 month period of November 2008 to February 2009. The study was conducted at the "chemical pathology laboratory at Tygerberg Hospital - an academic tertiary hospital in the Western Cape Province of South Africa. The laboratory is a division of the National Health Laboratory Services, which is a network of 265 pathology laboratories in South Africa."
Can you guess how many errors they found? And what was the impact of those errors?
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Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
I recently got a smart question from a concerned laboratory scientist. After reviewing one of the Sigma-metric studies on the website, he noted that while a particular method had a bad Sigma-metric, the main reason was due to the bias. His question was essentially (and I am paraphrasing here), "If the bias component comes from a particular difference between the instrument or kit and a reference system, shouldn't it be excluded from the Sigma-metric calculation?"
The reasoning is that the bias problem could be (1) eliminated through recalibration, (2) it may be a bias against a method that is not a reference method, so the difference might not be "real", or (3) if the reference range is adjusted and the method is used in exclusion, bias doesn't matter anyway.
We've had a lot of discussion about bias in our statistics lately. Is this a case where the Sigma-metric is "skewed"? What's your verdict? A discussion after the jump.
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Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
I was blessed enough to spend the week in China during Laboratory Professionals Week: training, lecturing, q & a’ing. Celebrating one laboratory’s verification of performance Not just celebrating with labs but I hope empowering them to achieve even better results in the future.
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Thrilled to find a strong new partner in Ecuador and Peru. After several visits to both countries, we have partnered with a local company to help expand the Westgard training and techniques as quickly and broadly as possible.
“QIE Quality Institute Erroch firma convenio de representación exclusiva con hashtag#WestgardQC, para los países de Perú y Ecuador, continuando así su labor de impartir conocimiento de alto nivel en garantía y gestión de calidad.
Felicitaciones a todo el equipo hashtag#QIE, el cual continúa trabajando para que la calidad sea tu marca.” 👍😊
https://lnkd.in/eDMK33A hashtag#Westgardrules
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS
Posted by Sten Westgard, MS