Quality Improvement in Clinical Laboratories: A Six Sigma Concept

Abstract

The quality of healthcare is an emerging concern worldwide. The term “Quality” has 
been appropriately defined and fairly well understood. However, many problems in delivering 
quality healthcare persist and these require urgent attention and solutions. An industrial grade 
quality performance is still a distant dream in the healthcare sector. There are a variety of 
reasons for this, chiefly the complexity of medicine and disease itself. An error rate as high as 
9.36% has been reported in clinical laboratories. These errors mainly occur in the pre-analytical 
stage of testing. Modern quality management tools like the six sigma concept offer realistic 
solutions to reach practical levels of perfection. The response of clinical diagnostic laboratories 
has been very slow in adopting these techniques to improve the quality of a process. It is 
imperative that healthcare in general and clinical diagnostic laboratories in particular promote 
and develop a culture of safety with the aid of modern quality management tools.