5. Quality Assurance

Example 1:

A 5 1/2 month old girl was weighed by the Measurement Team in training. The Team measured her length and recorded the measures before comparing them. The lengths ranged from 54.4 to 61.0 cm.

	Measurer   Measure 1   54.4 cm 2   60.9 cm 3   61.0 cm 4   60.8 cm

These ‘size’ measurements for length plot from significantly less than the 5th percentile to the 10th percentile. If one assumes this was an ‘initial’ assessment, this error could profoundly affect the course of clinical intervention.

This documents the difficulty of doing accurate length measurements for infants and the effect on the clinical impression by small measurement errors.