Quality Improvement in Clinical Laboratories: A Six Sigma Concept

Abstract

The quality of healthcare is an emerging concern worldwide. The term “Quality” has been appropriately defined and fairly well understood. However, many problems in delivering quality healthcare persist and these require urgent attention and solutions. An industrial grade quality performance is still a distant dream in the healthcare sector. There are a variety of reasons for this, chiefly the complexity of medicine and disease itself. An error rate as high as 9.36% has been reported in clinical laboratories. These errors mainly occur in the pre-analytical stage of testing. Modern quality management tools like the six sigma concept offer realistic solutions to reach practical levels of perfection. The response of clinical diagnostic laboratories has been very slow in adopting these techniques to improve the quality of a process. It is imperative that healthcare in general and clinical diagnostic laboratories in particular promote and develop a culture of safety with the aid of modern quality management tools.