Impact of international standards and initiatives on proficiency testing for medical laboratories

This paper is intended to briefly discuss several recent initiatives regarding External Quality Assessment (or Proficiency Testing) (PT/EQA) for medical laboratories in various parts of the world. While a brief paper cannot be comprehensive for all regions, it is possible to present some new standards and initiatives that are underway or proposed in many countries. Laboratory medicine was one of the first areas of laboratory testing to develop interlaboratory comparisons, and the first area where such comparisons became compulsory. Because of that, the medical field has often been the leader in the availability and use of PT/EQA, and has introduced many innovations that have been adopted in other areas. Perhaps other areas of testing will similarly adopt the developments discussed here, if they have not already done so. There are important developments in the medical area that are also occurring in other fields of testing, such as the growing number of countries that require some form of participation, and the increasing use of the Internet. These developments are important, but are not discussed further in this paper since they are occurring in many fields of testing.