Accreditation of medical laboratories. Some reflections from the Nordic Horizon

Accreditation has been a successful approach to improved quality management in laboratories and applied to a wide variety of medical laboratories. After the initial enthusiastic phase, in which quality improvement is significant, the endurance is threatened by an increasing bureaucracy of the process. A productive balance between the accreditation bodies and the profession needs to be sought. New standards have been suggested by ISO and the profession needs to take the initiative to assure that a global standard specially adopted to the requirements of medical laboratories becomes recognised and used. The new concept of uncertainty may become an important tool to further improve and describe the performance of laboratories by allowing inclusion of pre- and post-analytical sources of uncertainty as well as bias.