A Muggle's Laboratory

Dear Past Me,

Life in the laboratory is good. A little hectic, but when is it not a hectic day, right? I am currently getting trained on the Phadia 250 and it has many different quality controls. So, this letter is written explain what a Quality Control is.

Quality control in the medical laboratory is a statistical process used to monitor and evaluate the analytical process that produce patient results. They are used to validate whether the analyser is operating correctly and according to laboratory specification. It is first run before patient’s sample to make sure that when patient samples are ran, the results are reliable. Once the quality controls have all passed without any problems, the patients sample are ran and processed so the results obtained can be used for diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment planning.

You may think to yourself, why is it important?

So, Quality control increases reliability of testing and reduces incidence of false results given.  When Quality controls are run in the laboratory they are treated as a patient sample. Quality controls are there to make sure the most efficient and precise results are given. They are also used to make sure that the analyser is running correctly by comparing the results obtained every day to past results that we have gathered on our Quality control software.

If the results are not within the correct range, a fresh control is used or maintenance is carried out on the analyser to rectify any problems and it is tested a couple ( 3) times again to see if it will fall within the right range. If not, it’s an engineer problem. So you better have their numbers noted and saved.

You will be quite surprised on how by just running the quality controls, we have detected a problem with the analyser and have had the engineers coming to sort out the problem because we couldn’t fix it ourselves. But as you progress throughout the years you will see and meet the different engineers who will come and fix the machines.

Did you know, that they are two different types of Quality controls. We have internal and external quality controls. We have two different quality controls as it is part of the UKAS ISO15189 standard.

The difference between internal quality control and external quality control is quite literally in their names.

The internal Quality control within laboratory is usually an in-house patient or a patient like material made from human serum or urine pooled together. Quality control samples are usually frozen down in the laboratory or are kept in the fridge in liquid form. Whereas, Externally Quality controls come from the company of the analyser that you are using for example ThermoFisher or Biorad. Some of the External quality controls come in liquid form or some come in powdered form where you have to add water to.   

 So the things you need to remember:

• Quality controls are run before patient samples are tested for
• It is used to make sure that the machine is running properly and we are following the regulations
• They are two type of Quality control: Internal and External Quality controls.

I hope you have found this to be informative and helpful. I will be sending more letters your way to help you find your way to become a Biomedical Scientist.

Take care,

Muneebah