Management of Nonconforming Laboratory Events (GP32-P); Enumeration of Immunologically Defined Cell Populations by Flow Cytometry (H42-A2); Principles and Procedures for Blood Cultures (M47-A)

New CLSI Document Provides Guidelines for the Management of Nonconforming Laboratory Events
Wayne, Pennsylvania, USA—June 2007—Managing nonconforming events is an integral part of continuous quality improvement, which maximizes patient safety and advances quality initiatives. The value of a program to manage nonconforming events is to balance time spent on event reporting, event analysis, and implementing interventions.

Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI, formerly NCCLS) has recently published a new guideline, Management of Nonconforming Laboratory Events; Proposed Guideline (GP32-P), which provides an application example for the laboratory to develop a program for detecting, documenting, investigating, analyzing, and following up on events that do not conform with established policies, processes, and procedures (occurrence management).
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CLSI Establishes Performance Guidelines for Enumeration of Immunologically Defined Cell Populations by Flow Cytometry
Wayne, Pennsylvania, USA—June 2007—Advances in the availability and reproducibility of monoclonal antibody reagents specific for a wide range of cell types, coupled with lower costs for increasingly automated flow cytometers with greater data analysis capabilities, have made flow cytometry the method of choice for immunophenotyping hematopoietic cells in the clinical laboratory. The newly published edition of Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute’s (CLSI, formerly NCCLS) document, Enumeration of Immunologically Defined Cell Populations by Flow Cytometry; Approved Guideline—Second Edition (H42-A2), addresses issues of procedures and quality assurance for clinical applications of flow cytometry.  It is designed to aid clinical laboratorians in the development of quality assurance procedures and to establish the foundation for different laboratories using different commercially available instruments to obtain comparable results.
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CLSI Publishes New Guideline for Blood Cultures
Wayne, Pennsylvania, USA—June 2007—The prompt and accurate detection of bacteremia and fungemia is one of the most important functions of clinical microbiology laboratories. Guidelines for the collection, processing, and interpretation of blood cultures are needed so that laboratories and providers use optimal laboratory methods for recovering specific pathogens, interpret the results correctly, and help control healthcare costs.

In response to this need, Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI, formerly NCCLS) has recently published a new document, Principles and Procedures for Blood Cultures; Approved Guideline (M47-A). "The blood culture is among the most important tests performed by laboratories. These CLSI guidelines will help providers and laboratorians develop standardized practices for blood cultures that are based on the most current scientific and medical information," says Michael L. Wilson, MD, Denver Health Medical Center.
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