The importance of hospital re-accreditation: improving the timeliness of laboratory critical value reporting

Background: Patient safety is the main issue in healthcare services nowadays. Delaying to inform the critical value of laboratory results is a significant source of harm for the patient. The aim of this study is to compare the timeliness of laboratory critical value reporting before and after re-accreditation as one of the service quality indicators in Hospital X. Methods: This study was done by using observational cross-sectional in Hospital X on January - February 2020 with total sampling method of critical value reporting to the responsible clinician that originated from Intensive Care Unit (ICU), Verlos Kamer (VK), and inpatient ward (IW) 1-6 from January-December 2019. The timeliness of reporting was counted since the laboratory result was obtained until received by the responsible clinician within £ 30 minutes and categorized as "On time" or "Late". Results: During 2019, there were 816 reporting which has been done before re-accreditation (511) and after re-accreditation (305) with 17 kinds of tests. The most reported test was platelet with 349 (before re-accreditation) and 101 (after re-accreditation), whilst SGOT/SGPT and albumin were the fewest one. The lowest timeliness of reporting percentage was 76,00% (February), whilst the highest was 98,48% (November). The timeliness of reporting's percentage was 84,34% (before re-accreditation) and 94,43% (after re-accreditation). The statistical analysis result revealed Pearson Chi-Square correlation was 18,535 with significance 0,000 and 3,145 odds ratio which shows that re-accreditation could significantly increase the timeliness of critical value reporting three times. Conclusion: This result showed that re-accreditation could affect the timeliness of laboratory critical value reporting to the responsible clinicians