Basic QC Practices
Tricia Barry MT(ASCP) gives us another valuable article on the basics of quality control, explaining the who, what, when and how of recording your QC history -- plus the why we need to do it. It turns out your records are important - they provide a voice for the method. If you listen closely, you'll understand why things are out-of-control sometimes.
Those "Westgard rules" can be confusing. How do you use them? This lesson combines basic QC theory and practice to show you how. Dr. Westgard walks you through a Levey-Jennings chart day by day, plotting the control data and pointing out which run violates which rule. See how the multirule QC should be done (and find out if you've been doing it right yourself).
What do you do when you're control is out-of-control? Conventional wisdom is that you repeat the control or try a new one. But that ignores the problem. It doesn't solve anything. Elsa P. Quam BS, MT(ASCP) explains what bad habits we have and what good habits we can adopt to make our laboratory practice better
Dr. Westgard explains how an analytical testing process works to reject the bad runs and keep the good runs. False rejection and error detection are explained. The different kinds of problems (precision , accuracy, etc.) are also described. If you've ever wondered whether there was method to your laboratory madness, this article is for you.
This lesson discusses one of the cornerstones of QC practice. We can no longer take for granted that everyone knows how to build a control chart, plot the control values, and interpret those results correctly. Patricia L. Barry, co-author of Cost-Effective Quality Control: Managing the Quality and Productivity of Analytical Processes, provides a primer on how to construct, use, and interpret the Levey-Jennings chart.