Developments in external quality assessment for clinical microbiology laboratories

There has been considerable development in external quality assessment programs for clinical microbiology laboratories. Over the last 5 years samples have progressively become more clinically realistic and relevant. Programs are tending to produce more samples that look and act like real samples. As programs change to a broader range of challenge targets, the observed rate of errors is substantially greater for pre-analytic and post-analytic challenges than with analytic phase challenges. Rather than focusing only on analytic phase procedures, schemes should target to a greater extent pre-analytic and post-analytic aspects of the laboratory cycle.