“That Which Is Good Can Always Be Improved”

The Sister Daniela Laboratory in Brazil was Awarded National Recognition for the Excellence of its Analyses by the Quality Control National Program

The Quality Control National Program (PNCQ, the Programa Nacional de Controle de Qualidade) is a corporation for the comparative examination between 1,775 chemical analysis laboratories all over Brazil. Its quality control is broken down into two major categories: internal quality control (done within a given laboratory) and external control (done between different laboratories). Whereas the first type has existed for a number of years, the second was added in January 2005.

Quality control within a clinical laboratory is made as a means to assure its comprehensive quality. Several factors account for success in such an evaluation: the correct procedures in collecting samples; the selection and neatness of the materials used; the staff’s technical training; the working conditions and environment; the accuracy in its calculations; and its ongoing internal quality control.

Clinical pathology supplies information to the physician, providing the means needed for the prevention, diagnostic, prognostic and follow up of disease in general. Essentially, doctors rely on the quickness, precision and thoroughness of the data granted by the laboratory regarding the exams solicited by them.

The Program’s goal is to realistically assess the usual performance of a given laboratory by comparison with other laboratories nationwide, so as to identify problems which may have come up and to document how the same have been resolved, as well as to monitor, evaluate and quantitatively enhance the quality of a laboratory’s measures. This effort involves the whole staff, duly coordinated by a qualified, efficient individual who assumes responsibility for the laboratory.

This system, initiated in the United States in 1967, is today managed by the College of American Pathologists (CAP). In Brazil, the inter-laboratories comparison program is directed by the Quality Control National Program, Inc., (PNCQ) headquartered in Rio de Janeiro.

Control samples are assigned a number which remains unknown to a given laboratory’s analysts. Once a month results from all kinds of exams performed and analyzed by this given laboratory are sent to the PNCQ in Rio de Janeiro. PNCQ, in turn, relates these results with those it received from the other laboratories, and sends them back to this laboratory determining its deviations from the standard and rating its precision by comparison with all the laboratories nationwide.

Through participation in such a Program, a laboratory generates its basic data and supplies information on its analytical imprecisions, as well as the variants among the different methods commonly applied. In addition the Program is an ongoing resource both for the documentation of a given laboratory’s development in the clinical field, as well as for its conformity to laboratory measures toward a goal to be achieved for it to be thoroughly trustworthy.

A quality control basic principle prescribes that a laboratory’s reported data must agree with the correct or expected values. Every month, from the very start of the Program, the Sister Daniela Laboratory has been receiving a Certification of Excellency, and that, in comparison to a thousand seven hundred and seventy-four (1,774) laboratories all over Brazil!

It was with much joy we have received the news that, last December, our evaluation reached the 98% accuracy mark.

Sister Daniel Marie Meade, SFP and the Laboratory Staff

Franciscan Sisters of the Poor
E-mail: sfp@franciscansisters.org
Website: www.franciscansisters.org