Afghanistan - Biochemical quality controls: Tight, confident and accurate diagnoses

Afghanistan - Biochemical quality controls: Tight, confident and accurate diagnoses

AMI laboratory team has started biochemical quality control in Maiwand, Ali Abad (Kabul), Laghman, Kunar and Samangan hospitals.

They believe that with this program, lab technicians are able to ensure correct diagnoses themselves.

Quality control consists in testing one reference sample, whose biochemical values are known, and to compare the lab’s value with the expected value.

The program was started after offering primarily quality control training for lab technicians by two experts from “Biochemists Without Borders” in 2006 in Kabul. AMI’s lab team later trained lab technicians in provinces. Now the team guesses that biochemical quality control offers “confident and more precise diagnoses”, as required in “standard services”.

According to Maiwand hospital lab technician Mohammad Anwar, they follow the process daily or weekly, depending on biochemical parameters. He is happy with “more logical and standard services”. He remembers that in wartime, biochemical analyses were scarcely done. He added: “We were not sure of what we did and we were not answering people’s demands for: accurate diagnoses”.

More information about AMI’s mission in Afghanistan