Quality Control; Current problems and future trends - Tony Badrick

Tony Badrick

CEO of the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia Quality Assurance Programs. Also Adjunct Professor School of Pharmacy and Pharmacology, Griffith University, Gold Coast; Honorary Associate Professor, National Centre for Epidemiology and Public Health ANU College of Health and Medicine and ANU College of Science; Honorary Associate Professor, Faculty of Medicine, Bond University, Gold Coast; Adjunct or Visiting Fellow, Australian Institute for Health Innovation, Macquarie University. 

The talk will describe the development of quality control in clinical chemistry and focus on the fundamental assumptions made in creating the models that are routinely used. The basis of an QC strategy is an understanding of the errors that can arise, the material used to identify an error has occurred, an algorithm to flag when one of these errors is detected, and a process to follow to correct the error and amend any compromised patient results. Generally there have been two main strategies used in QC over the last forty years, each differing in the material used as the sample. Conventional QC uses a sample that substitutes for a patient, whereas patient-based QC uses patient results directly. Both systems have advantages and disadvantages. In the talk we will explore these differences to obtain a better understanding of Quality Control.