Laboratory quality standards and their implementation

Abstract

Establishing and maintaining laboratory quality standards are essential to generate reliable results to support clinical and public health actions. The Laboratory Quality Standards present a minimum set of standards that can be readily adapted by countries and applied to laboratories at every level of the health-care system. This document also outlines mechanism to implement them. This document will be of help to national policy-makers as well as regulators in developing national laboratory quality standards. It provides a simple approach to meet the minimum requirements set with the ultimate objective to comply with ISO 15189 in a logical and step-by-step manner.