Quality is our differentiator in medical investigations – PathCare Laboratories

Pathcare Laboratories, Nigeria’s only ISO accredited pathology laboratory has said that its investment in organising periodic Quality Seminars for its staff is borne out of its mission of providing quality pathological services to its clients across the country. The company made this known at the week-long seminar it organised for its pathologists and medical laboratory scientists from across the various regions of the company from21 – 28 November, 2016.
In his goodwill message to the participants at the Lagos edition of the seminar on 21 November, 2016, the company’s Executive Director, Operations, Dr. Tolulope Adewole, informed them that PathCare Laboratories is focused on delivering quality service to its patient and doctor clients at all times because that is its only differentiator from other players in the field of medical investigations.
“Any issue of misdiagnosis is an issue of quality and any life lost to misdiagnosis is an avoidable loss and a loss too many. It is actually an injustice to the patient and a big blow to his or her family and friends. To avoid the human or material costs that come with errors in diagnosis, we have set our goal towards achieving a zero per cent level of error, the same as the airlines.”
He defined quality as using the right equipment to process the right sample collected in the right container at the right time for the right patient at the right cost to make the right diagnosis and regretted that many Nigerians have lost their lives to misdiagnoses as a result of poor handling of patients’ specimens.

“Evidence-based medicine is hinged on obtaining an empirical evidence of a diagnosis before administering the appropriate treatment. All over the world, the bedrock of laboratory medicine is quality and its processes. For this, it is important that the entire value chain is covered,” he continued.
He informed that Pathcare Laboratories, as the only laboratory with the ISO-15189accreditation in Nigeria, strictly adheres to the quality processes as prescribed by the International Organisation for Standardisation for medical laboratories.
In her presentation, tagged Quality as the differentiator, the lead facilitator, Janette Wassung, SANAS Assessor and former head of Quality Management of PathCare South Africa, said that quality is a big global medical issue as it affects the overall health status of the world.

Wassung informed that quality process is an end-to-end affair, beginning with pre-analytical stage and runs through analytical and post-analytical stages.
According to her, “These stages cover the collection, transportation and reception of samples; reagents and instruments used and personnel who conduct the test; as well as the result format, international unit of measurement used and the pathologists that interpret the results.”
She noted that the cost of deploying a good quality management system (QMS) may look huge initially but this cost will amount to almost nothing when compared to the cost that laboratories would have to bear in case of a misdiagnosis. She called on laboratories and practitioners to institute a good QMS as a way of avoiding the costs that could come from a lack of good quality management system.

For Wassung, “misdiagnosis, the major fallout of a lack of QMS, leads to a number of unpalatable circumstances including death, unnecessary and elongated treatment and the attendant high cost. It could also result in lengthy and costly litigation for the laboratory.”
To drive home the need of instituting a good QMS, she told a real life story where, in another laboratory, a mother of two was diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer at the age of 34 and was told she only had months to live. She underwent five surgeries to excise a cyst from her gum, remove lower jaw and teeth and face reconstruction with bone taken from her lower leg. This woman, according to Wassung, was shocked to hear that she never had cancer in the first place. The slides from the biopsy of the cyst that was taken from her was contaminated by cells from another patient which led to a misdiagnosis.
Nathaniel Akhigbe