Lab Scientists, Technicians To Undergo Tests

The Registrar, Medical
Laboratory Science Council of Nigeria, Prof Anthony Emeribe, last Sunday said all laboratory scientists and technicians would undergo competency tests every six months.
Emeribe said at a forum in Abuja that the council had realised that a lot of laboratories were operating below expectations.
He said the council had commenced a strategic plan to ensure that all laboratories carried out continuous quality improvement to meet international best practices.
According to him, quality improvement is a difficult task in the laboratories, starting from the low hanging areas to the high-tech areas.
“In essence, we want to attune the laboratory personnel and laboratory management to be interested in quality improvement; it has to do with the mind first, before the resources – human or material.
“Once we get the personnel, the laboratory managers interested in quality improvement, it becomes easier. We’ve set up the structure, we have the human resources to train laboratory personnel through the various quality service essentials.
“We are also bringing up the idea that you don’t recruit a laboratory staff and then he goes on producing laboratory tests without periodic, what we call, competency testing,” he said.
The registrar said that it was saddening that many laboratories in the country failed to present themselves to External Quality Assessments (EQA) and  stressed that the council was poised to ensure that all medical laboratories adhered to the rules.
He said, “We want to ensure that before any lab in this country issues a result, it must enroll in External Quality Assessments (EQA), the national EQ lab of council in Zaria, will import proficiency panels. “We have also started producing a few; the international best practice is that for you to conduct lab testing for any area you must have an external component.
“If you are doing urinalysis, you must have urine sent to you from time to time, or blood or whatever, so that you test it and report back to us the result you have got. “We look at it and let you know if you are doing well or not; if you are not doing well, we have set up a national corrective action team that gets back to you to find out why you are not doing well,” he added.