On October 18-19th, 1WA attended the 24th annual EQALM Symposium in Ljubljana, Slovenia. EQALM is the European Organisation for External Quality Assurance Providers in Laboratory Medicine and its objective is to provide a forum for co-operation and exchange of knowledge on quality-related matters, especially with regards to EQA programs in Europe, but also outside of Europe. Congress highlights were working group meetings, ISO-17043, Adam Uldall Award lecture, Molecular Genetics and EQALM collaborations.
As of 2018, 1WA Canada and 1WA Italia are EQALM members and both sent a representative to the symposium. Our team actively contributed to the working group meetings for Microbiology, Virtual Microscopy (VM) and Immunohematology.
At this occasion, our CEO Daniel Taylor introduced to the EQALM crowd our EQA Sample Production Program (EQASP) and gave a presentation on the outcome of the first training sessions held in Abuja (Medical Laboratory Science Council of Nigeria), Addis Ababa (Ethiopian Public Health Institute) and Amman (Central Health Public Laboratory) during the Microbiology working group meeting. We’re pleased to say that the EQASP initiative gathered the interest of a number of EQA providers.
In 2019 1WA fully implemented 2 virtual microscopy EQA programs in OASYS: HEMD434 - Peripheral Blood Morphology and Differential and SPVM434 Sperm Viability and Morphology. The VM OASYS software was demoed to the VM working group audience and the Virtual Microscopy Image Bank concept was introduced.
Finally, 1WA participated in an international study conducted by the Immunohematology working group by providing data from our EQA program. Preliminary outcomes of the study were reviewed and discussed during this session and new suggestions for further analysis and study conclusions were proposed by the intervening members. The study will be shared upon publishing later in 2020.
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