Uso de indicadores de qualidade no laboratório clínico: revisão integrativa

Abstract

Introduction: Laboratory quality is defined as the assurance that each and every step of the testing process is performed correctly. In order to improve the quality of laboratories, it became necessary to create minimum organizational standards for them to function. The clinical laboratory must ensure the reliability of the laboratory services provided through internal and external quality control. All systematic actions necessary to provide confidence in the laboratory services to meet patient health needs and prevent errors from occurring are defined by the operational component of the quality control system that can be measured using quality indicators. Objectives: To identify which quality indicators are most commonly used among clinical laboratories, and in which phase of the testing process the highest number of errors is observed. Methodology: Integrative review of articles searched in the Virtual Health Library with the keywords: Quality Indicators and Clinical Laboratory, from 2016 to 2021, in English, Spanish and Portuguese languages. Results: Among the articles found 15 were selected, where they address the extraanalytical and analytical phases, and most authors talk about the pre-analytical phase, since the high amount of errors observed in this step, followed by the post-analytical step and in a superficial way the analytical step was mentioned, since it presents the lowest amount of errors in the laboratory.