External Quality Assessment (EQA) in medical laboratories have evolved over the past 50 years to provide more sophisticated systems compared with the simple participants’ analytical performance evaluation of earlier years.  There are clear distinctions between the proficiency testing schemes and the evolved External...

That is the question the Hvidovre Hospital had to ask itself in May 2003, when the Danish National Board of Health and the Copenhagen Hospital Corporation appointed it to be one of the country's three key sites for receiving and treating SARS patients. Once appointed, the hospital began a painstaking process of...

Preanalytical errors are said to be the reason for up to 75 % [1] of all errors in laboratory medicine. The diagnostic consequences depend on the magnitude of the preanalytical error.  In worst case, these errors may lead to mistreatment of patients; in all cases, these errors are an extra workload for the hospital...

Danish neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) are known throughout the world for practicing minimal handling. Because it is non-invasive, transcutaneous monitoring of pO₂ and pCO₂ plays an important role in this setup. acutecaretesting.org has interviewed Professor Gorm Greisen, MD, Dr. Med. Sci., and Head of the...

Although blood glucose measurement is commonly performed, the use of a whole-blood sample introduces complications and compromise in terms of the assay principle, the method of calibration and the expression of results. Most point-of-care systems are calibrated against a method chosen by the manufacturer for...

England's Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals have a POCT system they consider a success. This is a roadmap of the steps they have taken.

According to the Hvidovre Hospital, standardizing is a must if POCT is to run optimally. In the first article of the series "POCT setups for blood gas", acutecaretesting.org interviews the Danish hospital on how they have successfully implemented POCT.

p50 is a shorthand representation of hemoglobin-oxygen affinity. A lower p50 is protective in ambient hypoxemia, whereas increasing the p50 should be beneficial in hypoxia due to lung disease, anemia, and tissue ischemia. Despite encouraging theoretical and experimental data, it is not yet established that...

When performing method comparisons, it is important to address a number of preparatory and preanalytical issues to ensure that comparisons solely reflect the analytical differences between the two methods in question. This article provides preparatory and preanalytical checklists that can be used when comparing two...

Preparing for an accreditation inspection is often synonymous with carts full of paper. For some labs, though, the paper hassle associated with accreditation is now history. These labs are letting their data management systems do all the work.