Assessment of Knowledge, Attitude and Practices of Medical laboratory professionals on use of Internal Quality Control (IQC) for Clinical Laboratory Tests among Selected Health Centers in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Creators: name: Mamuye, Dereje
Publisher: name: National Academic Digital Repository of Ethiopia
Year: 2014

description: Background: Internal quality control (IQC) is designed to detect, reduce, and correct deficiencies in a laboratory's internal analytical process prior to the release of patient results, in order to improve the quality of the results reported by the laboratory. As different studies indicated, 5% to 10% of laboratories are deficient in IQC practices, including IQC frequency, use of appropriate material, and statistical processing. Understanding what medical laboratory professionals know about IQC, their thinking about it and their actual practice of what they know will help to design solutions for improving quality of medical laboratory service. Objective: To assess Knowledge, altitude and practices (KAP) of medical laboratory professionals on the use of IQC for laboratory tests among selected Health centers. Methods: Cross sectional study design was employed from December 2013 to May, 2014 to assess KAP of IQC for laboratory tests on 175 medical laboratory professionals working in 30 selected health centers in Addis Ababa. The data was entered and analyzed using SPSS version 19.0 soft ware. Descriptive statistics was computed for most of the study variables. Logistic regression analysis was used to determine associations with dependent and independent variables; crude and adjusted odds ratios were used to see the strength of the association and control for confounder"s effect. P values less than 0.05 were taken as statistically significant. Result: From a total of 175 study participant majorities (81.7 %) had better Knowledge about preparing in house made IQC and 18.3 % have no knowledge about it.. All in all 98 (68.5%) of the study participants did not face failed result for IQC while 45 (31.5%) had faced failed result. And their decision for failed IQC result was 21(46.6%) immediately reject whereas 24 (53.3 %) of them would repeat the test before rejecting the result. When study participant's feeling was classified as bad, good, very good and excellent, 4 (2.3%) had bad, 79(45.1%) had good, 38 (21.7%) had very good and 54(30.9%) have excellent attitude towards IQC. About 32 (18.3%) of the study participants had never performed IQC while 143(81.7%) of them declared that they perform IQC. However, only 49.1% had documented their IQC result and the remaining 50.9% have no document. Regarding frequency of IQC, 64 (57.6%) of them perform IQC per batch, 24 (21.6%) daily, 6 (5.4 %) monthly and 17(15.3%) claimed performing IQC weekly. And over all 53(47.8%) of the respondents accepted this frequency Major reason for not performing IQC for laboratory tests in this study were work load, difficulty of IQC materials to prepare for some routine tests, cost of IQC materials, lack of supply, lack of staff members. The major factors for good IQC practice in this study were educational level, work experience, participation in SLMTA program. Taking LQM training, however, had no significant association both with Knowledge as well as IQC practice. Conclusion: The study demonstrates good IQC knowledge and attitude which is not translated into an equivalent practice as demonstrated by poor documentation. Working in a laboratory which participates in SLMTA has a positive association while LQM training has no significant association with IQC knowledge and practice. Hence, practice focused training as well as motivation activities are needed to promote the use IQC and reduce rate of error for laboratory results