Assessment of analytical bias in ferritin assays and impact on functional reference limits.

Serum ferritin is currently the recommended laboratory test to investigate iron deficiency. There have been efforts to standardise serum ferritin assays with implementation of traceability to the World Health Organization reference standard. We evaluate the analytical bias among five widely used commercial ferritin assays in Australia.

Parallel processing and maintaining adequate alignment between instruments and methods.

Parallel processing of laboratory tests across more than one instrument platform: permits dealing with increasing workloads; but broadens uncertainty of measurement; minimising measurement uncertainty means keeping assay performances continuously aligned. Important questions are: Why is there the need to demonstrate "acceptable alignment" between methods/instruments? What methods/tools can be used to test method/instrument alignment and how adjustments can be made? What is an "acceptable" alignment? How often should alignments be checked and what is the reasoning for this?

Quality assessment of interpretative commenting in clinical chemistry.

Background: Clinical interpretation of laboratory results is an integral part of clinical chemistry. However, the performance goals for assessing interpretative commenting in this discipline have not been as well established as for the quality of analytical requirements.

Methods: We present a review of the 10 case reports circulated in the 2002 Patient Report Comments Program by the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia (RCPA) and the Australasian Association of Clinical Biochemists Chemical Pathology Group of RCPA-Quality Assurance Programs Pty Ltd.

A discussion of cases in the 2001 RCPA-AQAP Chemical Pathology Case Report Comments Program.

Aim: We present a descriptive analysis of the 10 case reports distributed in the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia (RCPA) and the Australasian Association of Clinical Biochemists (AACB) Chemical Pathology Patient Report Comments Program to assess the quality of interpretative commenting in clinical biochemistry in 2001.

Method: Participants were asked to comment on a given set of biochemistry results attached with brief clinical details. All responses received were translated into key phrases and graphically presented on a histogram.