Apr 23, 2012 | Compliance, Legal, and Malpractice, Laboratory Pathology
Public awaits findings from board of inquiry empaneled by the Alberta Health System
Once more, a province in Canada is dealing with public disclosure of unacceptable rates of errors in anatomic pathology testing services. This time it is the healthcare system of Alberta. Since November, the public has learned about two separate cases of individual pathologists who were determined to have misdiagnosed cancer cases.
But pathology errors turned out to be only part of this story. Public concern in Alberta about the quality of diagnostics services was further heightened by another round of newspaper stories later in December. This time, the news was about the discovery of imaging errors made by a radiologist working in one of Alberta’s hospitals.
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Dec 7, 2011 | Laboratory News, Laboratory Pathology, Management & Operations
Clinical pathology laboratories operate with little effective regulatory oversight in West African nation
In Nigeria, patients are complaining about the problems caused by both misdiagnosis and faulty medical laboratory test results. There is also the problem that not all physicians and patients have access to a high quality clinical laboratory.
Nigeria’s news media is giving this situation wide play. Government officials have been forced to acknowledge the poor state of the country’s clinical laboratory testing services. In turn, this has led to great scrutiny of medical laboratory testing in Nigeria.
For the pathology and laboratory medicine profession in developed nations, these widely-publicized issues in Nigeria are consistent with the global trend of standardization in the operation and management of clinical laboratories. Within Nigeria, there is recognition that many misdiagnoses happen because physicians and patients frequently lack access to a reliable and high-quality clinical laboratory.
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