How to Manage Your Laboratory’s Nonconforming Events

Although health care continues to make significant strides in improving patient safety, opportunities for continuous improvement remain, especially in areas involving occurrence management, also known as nonconforming events. By identifying and addressing these types of events, laboratories can elevate health care delivery and bring quality assurance to the next level.

Most nonconforming events are the result of problems with existing processes. Laboratory professionals need to have defined processes to not only report nonconforming events, but also to follow through and determine the causes. Then they can implement process improvement changes, explains Sheila Woodcock, MBA, FCSMLS(D), president of QSE Consulting.

Management of Nonconforming Laboratory Events; Proposed Guideline (GP32-P), published by the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI, formerly NCCLS) in May 2007, was designed with this exact purpose in mind.

Read the full article as originally published in LABMEDICINE, September 2007.

“Lab Guidelines & Standards” is a monthly column published in LABMEDICINE. Watch for additional articles from the column in future issues of CLSI eNews. [ return to top ]