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Klinisk Biokemi i Norden · 2 2013
External Quality Assurance of Laboratory Medicine
in the Nordic Countries
Gunnar Nordin
1
, Gitte Henriksen
2
, Anna Karlsson
1
, Gunn BB Kristensen
3
, Harri Laitinen
4
,
Inger Plum
2
, Pål Rustad
3
, Sverre Sandberg
5
and Ingunn Þorsteinsdóttir
6
1
Equalis, Sweden,
2
DEKS, Denmark,
3
Norwegian Clinical Chemistry EQA program, Norway,
4
Labquality, Finland,
5
The Norwegian Quality Improvement of Primary Care Laboratories, Norway
and
6
Icelandic Society for Clinical Biochemistry and Laboratory Medicine, Iceland
External quality assurance (EQA) of medical
laboratories is a major tool for both the indivi-
dual laboratory to prove its proficiency and for
the laboratory community to show agreement, or
disagreement, between different laboratory met-
hods in use. The health care systems in the Nordic
countries share many similarities, e.g. the tech-
nological development of laboratory methods in
use. This is also the background for a 20 year old
collaboration between the EQA organizations in
the Nordic countries under the name of EQAnord.
In this issue of KBN backgrounds a description of
EQAnord and its activities and statutes are given,
together with a short description of the current
activities in the different EQA organizations.
EQAnord
• EQAnord is a forum for communication and co-
operation among organizers of external quality
assurance (EQA) programs in the Nordic countries.
These organizers are DEKS in Denmark, KLLÍ in
Iceland, NKK (serving large medical laboratories)
and NOKLUS (serving primary care laboratories)
in Norway, Equalis in Sweden and Labquality in
Finland.
• Examples of topics that have been discussed and
partly adopted in the work are:
• Organize the preparation of common materials with
values assigned by reference measurement proce-
dures to be used in EQA programs in the Nordic
countries (e.g. the Nordic Trueness Project [
1
]).
This may lead to a network for providing reference
measurement procedure values.
• Organize joint Nordic surveys linked to EQA pro-
The participants at the EQAnord-meeting in 2012 at Equalis in Uppsala. From the left: Kristin M Aakre, Gunn B Kristensen,
Anita Latvala, Jonna Pelanti, Gunnar Nordin, Gro Gidske, Harri Laitinen, Anna Karlsson and Inger Plum (Photo: Marie
Lundberg).
