Call for Enrolling More Professionals in the IFCC Project on Laboratory Errors and Patient Safety

Patient safety is the foundation of good care. In the last decades, a body of evidence has been accumulated to demonstrate that pre- and post-analytical phase are more vulnerable to errors in laboratory medicine than the analytical phase. Aims of the project of the IFCC Working Group on "Laboratory Errors and Patient Safety" (WG-LEPS) are: a) to develop a series of Quality Indicators (QIs), specifically designed for clinical laboratories, b) to create a common reporting system for clinical laboratories based on standardized data collection, and c) to define state-of the-art and Quality Specifications (QSs) for each QI Preliminary results demonstrate that a Model of Quality Indicators can serve as a tool to monitor and control the pre-, intra- and post-analytical activities. However, only after enrolling a more consistent number of clinical laboratories, it should be possible to assure consistency to the data collected and reliability to the QIs identified and to related QSs.