/7. /hj Quality Assurance in Health Care: Missions, Goals, Activities

The most challenging mission of medical personnel today is quality assurance in health care. To meet this challenge, the essential elements of a six-phase system for total quality control for the medical laboratory are outlined under the headings of design control, incoming material control, process control, output control, reliabil-ity control, and special verification studies. Review of existing goals and activities of programs related to this mission indicates both problems and rich opportunities for individual laboratory professionals and their organi-zations. For effective implementation of this mission, the laboratory professionals will have to create the at-mosphere of a coilegium where all interested scientists communicate across disciplines to eliminate the sys-tematic biases and improve the accuracy, precision, and specificity of clinical laboratory measuring systems, to assure medically meaningful and useful assay results for the broad spectrum of health care that is necessary for the well, the near-well, and the sick. Why Quality Assurance Mission? The greatest challenge to medical personnel today is quality assurance in health care. The impetus of consumerism demands that laboratory professionals as individuals-and collectively as organizations-reconsider the priorities for the usual general mis-sions of their organizations. Service to the members, representing the profession, and strengthening the profession itself are definitely self-serving missions and have been the ones emphasized by most organi-zations. The time has come to give the quality-assur-ance mission top priority and emphasize the mission of service to the public by developing mechanisms of direct service