Mistakes in a Stat Laboratory: Types and Frequency (Laboratory Management‪)‬

INDEXING TERMS: total quality management * emergency medicine * clinical audit Quality and accountability are the focus of current concern in laboratory medicine. Mounting evidence indicates that reliability cannot be achieved in a clinical laboratory through the mere promotion of accuracy in the analytical phase of the testing process. Laboratorians have long realized the importance of monitoring all steps in laboratory testing to detect and correct defects. However, most of their attention has been directed toward detecting and correcting defects in the analytical portion of the testing process, such that analytical mistakes now account for 10% of all mistakes. Ross and Boone found that mistakes made in laboratory testing were distributed as follows: preanalytical 46%, analytical 7%, and postanalytical 47% [1]. Similar data were obtained by Bachner et al. in a CAP Q-probe study on blood bank quality-assurance practice [2] and, more recently, by Boone et al. in a survey on transfusional medicine [3].