Spring 2025
Applications open: January 22, 2025
Applications close: March 31, 2025
Course offering: April 7 – June 15, 2025
Course Description
Quality Control (QC) has one of the most important impacts on laboratory testing, it ensures both precision and accuracy of patient samples and is critical to the overall success of a laboratory. The role of QC in the laboratory is to improve process methods, testing efficacy, and customer satisfaction.
This course on QC methods dives deeper into important concepts and approaches to providing the maintaining the most accurate and rigorous clinical testing, to maximize the positive impact of clinical laboratory testing on patient care. Here you will learn how to identify problems in the laboratory and make improvements reactively and proactively. Ultimately, the goal is to create a culture of quality in your laboratory.
The focus of this course is to introduce you to process control methods, explain the cost of quality in the laboratory, and provide you key methods for finding errors and preventing them from occurring again. You will also learn about systematic factors affecting diagnostic testing, evaluation and implementation of diagnostic technology, and new innovations occurring in the laboratory.
Minimal mathematical or statistical theories are presented in this course. The focus is on practical quality concepts that can be implemented into your laboratory.
Course Learning Objectives
The goal of this course is to improve quality process control methods in a laboratory by strengthening practical skills to quality control for program participants.
Participants completing the course at the highest level of achievement should be able to:
- Explain the importance of systems thinking in the clinical laboratory;
- Identify problems in the laboratory and implement process improvement methods;
- Explains basic terminology used in quality control and recognize key methods for ensuring quality in the laboratory;
- Implement quality assurance practices (timeliness, reliability and accuracy of testing);
- Explain the importance of maintaining sample integrity and assuring that all regulations and requirements are met when transporting samples;
- Recognize the costs associated with laboratory quality control;
- Deploy managerial methods to improve laboratory testing and processes;
- Develop methods to measure customer satisfaction;
- Establish methods to implement and evaluate new clinical laboratory diagnostic tests using the principles of test verification, validation, and quality control;
- Prevent, detect, and act on unwanted laboratory testing errors; and
- Apply processes to encourage and implement innovation in clinical laboratory testing practices.