Basic QC Practices

We spend most of our time trying to keep all of our data within the limits, obeying the rules, maintaining compliance. But if we needed to, could we recognize when the rules were really broken? Here's a simple exercise - if you're told that all the rules have been broken, can you find where the violations occurred?

A reader-submitted example reminds us how common the use (and mis-use) of manufacturer ranges and package inserts can blind laboratories to the true problems occurring in their methods.

Here's a laboratory quality control mystery. See if you can guess what happened with the following real-world QC situation...

A user submitted a very interesting scenario: a mysterious discrepancy between the instrument records and the LIS records of QC values. Do you think your laboratory could this mystery?