The central role of EQA in harmonisation and standardisation for laboratory medicine
05/12/2017
Rhonda Greaves from Australia has written a powerful editorial on this topic in the April issue of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (Clin Chem Lab Med 2017; 55(4): 471-473). As she points out external quality assurance (EQA) is often the mechanism by which discordance between the results from different methods is identified. Therefore, EQA is recognised as a pillar in the overall process of standardisation. The other four pillars of standardisation are:
- Certified reference materials (CRM)
- Reference measurement procedures (RMP)
- Reference laboratories
- Reference intervals and decision points
The editorial refers to another article in the same issue (p522-529), which illustrates how the establishment of an EQA for serum dihydrotestosterone has helped to identify the need for method standardisation.