PT Bonus Opportunities: would your laboratory benefit?

PT Bonus Opportunities: would your laboratory benefit?

Frequently we talk about the benefits of Proficiency Testing as a method for the detection of systemic error in laboratory testing, especially as part of the examination phase.  Once you accept that Proficiency Testing challenges have been thoroughly quality controlled and are highly reliable, then it becomes, as my old calculus professor used to say, intuitively obvious that the greatest probable cause of deviation between a clinical laboratory’s result and the PT program’s result is some form of problem within the clinical laboratory.  It likely is a slip or distraction by someone in the laboratory’s testing chain, but it may reflect a larger systemic error that is otherwise is being not recognized or is under-appreciated.  Discarding deviations in PT performance can be lost opportunities for improvement.

But recently we had two interesting results come to light that reinforce that systemic error in the testing pathway detectable with proficiency testing materials can come from all sorts of places. 

As per our normal routine, our PT coordinator was checking the laboratories that had not yet sent in their results 48 hours before the due date, and found one such laboratory and contacted them.  [As an aside we can provide that extra level of service because we are a small program.  Large programs with thousands of participants could never provide that extra assistance.]

The laboratory checked their records and came back on the phone and said that the problem was on our end, because the laboratory had never received our samples in the first place.  We were the problem.  So a check was made through the courier service and what was found was that the samples had been delivered on time as committed, and that the delivery way-bill had been signed off within the laboratory.  A call-back was made and sure enough, the box was sitting in the refrigerator where they had been placed, un-opened.

The story has two messages.  First, if this happened with our package, this could have been a one-off by someone who simply forgot (call that a human slip) or perhaps this happens more commonly than the laboratory is aware (call that a system error).  Second, our system informs the laboratory on the day the package goes out.  If there is going to be a problem it would be captured within 48 (max 72) hours.  If someone had called us and checked, the box would have been found immediately.  That this didn’t happen either means that a distraction resulted in the call not being made, or that the laboratory has an inventory-control problem which needs checking. 

Either way the point is that even without being tested, this PT shipment has resulted in detection of two problems (is it OK to call them errors?) that the laboratory now has the opportunity to check-out.  Either they were a chain of simple human foible, or they were a manifestation of failures in the delivery handling and monitoring procedures. 

A second story is similar, but starts not from us contacting the laboratory, but the laboratory contacting us with an apology for a 5 day delay in submitting results.  Apparently, there usually was a Quality technologist whose job it was to submit  PT challenges reports, but that person had recently retired and no one had yet been appointed and so the job was “slipping through the cracks”. 

We understand that people do retire; that is called “business as usual”.  But if the PT reports are not being submitted, are there other tasks that are not getting done.  If quality control testing is being delayed, and reagent defects are not being identified, then how many hours are going to be lost having to remediate erroneous test reports?  Or worse, what if quality control testing isn’t being done at all?

My point is that PT samples are more than just a material to challenge the examination phase of laboratory testing.  They are known and traceable and regularly received materials that can be used to monitor every aspect of the laboratory cycle.  Usually everything works as it should, and sometimes it does not.  It is when things do not go well that these “safe” opportunities arise for checking for system error. 

Opportunity accepted or opportunity ignored?