Imbibe Culture Of Quality Management In Nigerian Laboratory System –Expert

The Head, Human Virology, Nigerian Institute of Medical Research (NIMR), Lagos, Dr Rosemary Audu,  last Tuesday advocated the culture of quality management system in Nigerian laboratories.

Audu stated this in Lagos while presenting a research project titled “Establishing an external quality assessment programme in Nigeria”.

She observed that imbibing the culture of quality management system would play a strategic role of providing evidence for clinical management of patients.

Audu said that laboratory services were an essential component in the diagnosis and treatment of persons infected with malaria, HIV, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases.

She noted that the laboratory infrastructure and test quality for all types of clinical laboratories are weak in most African countries.

She explained that after the first phase of the laboratory study, it was evident that concerted effort was required to train Nigerian laboratories on quality management system.

“The major issue with HIV diagnosis was the non- use of the national testing algorithm, even though there was a decline from 83 per cent in the 1st round to 47 per cent at the end of the 4th round.

“Challenges observed with TB results showed a high level (20 percent) of false negative results. There were also 8 per cent of reported false positive results, which will unduly expose individuals to drugs which are toxic to their systems” Audu stated.

She said that there was need to increase the accuracy of malaria diagnosis by training and retraining of laboratory technicians in order to make them better equipped and skilled to generate accurate results, which would help increase the health indices of man.