Klinisk Biokemi i Norden · 2 2013
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During the last 15 years the operations of clinical
laboratories have been undergoing a transformation.
The most evident trends in Finland were that major
investigations were centralized into large units and
simultaneously also point-of-care test started to expand
in smaller healthcare units. Labquality, up with the
times, focused resources on EQA of point-of-care tes-
ting. At the end of the 2002 it issued a recommendation
for point-of-care testing, which was updated in 2009.
The theme was also taken up in
Quality Assurance
Days
and expert working groups.
Over one hundred experts are involved in planning,
running and evaluating the quality assessment sche-
mes. Labquality has a special EQA Steering Group to
support company’s management team. Besides seven
expert groups in different laboratory medicine discipli-
nes meet regularly and give advice in various issues. In
addition Labquality has one expert group for training
and education and one for publications and production
of marketing materials.
Development and utilization of information tech-
nology in Labquality’s EQA services have been major
aims of development work in recent years. The com-
mon theme of the innovations has been to develop
the company’s website to enable data to be transferred
electronically. The most important achievements by
2011 were starting e-schemes, creating the participant
services channel in Labquality’s website, enabling regist-
ration for Quality Assurance Days through the website
and launching other newweb based services. In 2012 the
new production management system called LabScala
was introduced. There is a constant agile development
approach ongoing and Labquality will modernize and
replace its current production managements systems
stepwise.
Other services
In June 2001 Labquality Ltd. and fifteen other social
welfare and health care organizations founded the qua-
lity auditing organization
Qualisan Ltd
. This company’s
operations were reorganized in 2007, when the certifica-
tion and quality auditing services and the brand name
Qualisan
were transferred to Labquality. Later that year,
Labquality purchased
SHQuality Ltd,
which
operated
in the same sector, to support the new product range
within the Group. In autumn 2008 the business opera-
tions of Qualisan and SHQuality were transferred into
a new subsidiary named
Qualitor Ltd.
Labquality provides third-party control materials and
calibrators through
Bioclin Ltd.,
which is an ISO9001 cer-
tified distributor andmanufacturer of high quality control
and reference materials for internal quality assessment.
Labquality’s main annual training event, The Quality
Assurance Days were renamed Labquality Days in 2007.
The original name of the EQA award first presented in
1994,
Laaduntarkkailupalkinto
, became history with the
February 2008 event, where merited promoters of EQA
were for the first time recognized through the Quality
Promotion Award
Laadunedistämispalkinto
.
Future developments
In January 2011 the
Balance Consulting
research and
analysis unit of
Kauppalehti Ltd.,
which publishes
Finland’s main financial newspaper, ranked
Labquality
Group
as one of the most successful Finnish compa-
nies in export markets in 2010. After 41
years of its
foundation, the company can be characterized as an
international health care quality company. In addition
to EQA services for laboratories and the sale of reference
materials, company’s services also include certification,
audit and accreditation of quality management systems
in social welfare and health care, and training. The core
objective however has hardly changed: promotion of
patient safety through quality improvement has been
theme underlying the growth of the parent company
since 1971. From the beginning of 2013 Bioclin Ltd.
and Qualitor Ltd. will be merged into Labquality Ltd.
but they will still exist as product names in the future.
In 2012 all training and educational activities were
decided to centralize under one organization and so
called “
Labquality Academy
” was founded. In practice
a working team takes care of various training days and
expert meetings. They response to customer inquiries
to participate in their internal training and education,
eLearning courses and distributor meetings. The wor-
king team is responsible for material production that
relates to social and health care auditing and EQA edu-
cational services to Labquality’s customers.
Today Labquality is still an independent and impar-
tial organization. Over 4500 laboratories in 47 countries
participate in Labquality’s EQA schemes. Laboratories
abroad are served by over 20 distributors in different
countries, the focus being in Europe.
References
