Quality Improvement in Clinical Laboratories: A Six Sigma Concept
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17140/PLMOJ-1-104Keywords:
Quality healthcare, Clinical laboratories, Six sigma, Medical errors, Culture of safety, Quality managementAbstract
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.
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