Between November 24th-26th was held the 2019 POLQM Conference of Laboratory Quality Management – Meeting the Needs in Vancouver. Held every two years, this conference is attended by laboratory professional and presenters from many provinces in Canada and from the United States and is a great occasion to learn and discuss about the new topics in laboratory quality.
This year’s theme was a reference to Philip Crosby and his definition of Quality as meeting requirements. Crosby as referred to quality with ‘the measurement of quality is the price of nonconformance’ and stated that the costs and consequences of poor quality all too often result in the customer that pays.
Not only did the conference focused on important topics like key updates on key standards like ISO15189, ISO22870 and understanding risks for medical laboratories (ISO22367) and medical devices, it also included a lot of information on today’s issues like the QC of cannabis and the impact of gender diversity on laboratory services.
As mentioned by Dr Sheila Woodcock, ISO15189 will be revised and will include new sections based on the already revised ISO17025:2017. You can expect more information on customer service, risk management, ethics and cybersecurity.
Other noted presentations were about antimicrobial resistance and on methods to control the spread of these infections. The last day also had interesting conferences on laboratory test utilization, interpretation by physicians and showed great findings that when pathologists are working collaboratively with clinicians, it eliminates 90% of unnecessary laboratory tests.
On Monday November 25th, two of our staff, Mana Sharazi-Kia and Jean-Frederic Flandin participated in the conference and presented on the Quality Control of Cannabis and on In-country EQA Sample Production respectively. All the presentations are available online at https://polqm.med.ubc.ca/2019-polqm-quality-conference/2019-conference-presentations/
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