In September, not only schoolchildren and students sat down at their desks - the National Center of Accreditation continues an extensive training program in current areas. The day before, a seminar began for more than 20 employees of the NCA and Kazakh reference laboratories on the ISO 15195 standard “Laboratory medicine. Requirements for reference measurement laboratories” with the participation of Turkish experts.
In Kazakhstan, not a single laboratory is accredited to this standard yet. The possible reason was explained by lecturer Dr. Muzaffer Ozen, who noted that the 15195 standard is “very strict and not easy to comply with, but if it is met, laboratories can become much more successful.”
That the time has come for a reboot of modern medicine has been made abundantly clear by the recent COVID-19 pandemic. At that turbulent time, samples of the same person in different laboratories could show different results, which brought a lot of negativity and negatively affected the lives of millions of people around the world. Like a litmus test, the coronavirus has exposed problems both in the manufacturers of medical tests and in the methods of medical research and treatment, which is why the need for the “rigorous” standards in medicine that Dr. M. Ozen talks about has greatly increased.
NCA Deputy General Director Yerzhan Karassayev also emphasized that “after the pandemic, the world rebooted and realized that the most important goal is our health, therefore medicine must be of high quality. That is why we organized this seminar with the invitation of Turkish experts, since the Turkish experience in applying the standard is of great interest.
The purpose of training assessors and physicians from Astana, Almaty and Pavlodar is to increase awareness of the competency requirements of reference laboratories. Standard 15195 works in conjunction with standards 17025 “General requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories”, 15189 “Medical laboratories. Requirements for quality and competence", 17043 "Conformity assessment. Basic requirements for conducting proficiency testing." Complementing each other, these standards ensure high-quality laboratory tests as the basis for correct diagnosis and error-free treatment.
During the seminar, the requirements for laboratory personnel, including young specialists with insufficient professional experience, were examined in detail; the need to participate in interlaboratory comparison programs; methods of research and verification of results; metrological traceability and uncertainty calculations and other aspects of laboratory work that are important to anyone seeking medical care.
