National prevalence survey in Brazil to evaluate the quality of microbiology laboratories: the importance of defining priorities to allocate limited resources.

This report describes a survey of microbiology laboratories (n = 467) serving Brazilian hospitals with ≥10 intensive care beds and/or involved in the government health care adverse event reporting system. Coordinators were interviewed and laboratories classified as follows: Level 0 (no minimal functioning conditions-85.4% of laboratories); Level 1 (minimal functioning conditions but inadequate execution of basic routine-6.