A quality management system can be defined as “coordinated activities to direct and control an organization with regard to quality. In a quality management system, all aspects of the laboratory operation, including the organizational structure, processes and procedures, need to be addressed to assure quality. In order to assure quality, it is essential to perform all processes and procedures in the laboratory in the best possible way. The laboratory is a complex system, involving many steps of activity and many people. The complexity of the system requires that many processes and procedures be performed properly. When things are done perfectly as per the standard there will be an accreditation .Our laboratory is supporting different selected hospital and health center laboratories in the catchment by training, mentoring and auditing for appropriate implementation of LQMS and to make them ready for accreditation.

External quality assessment (EQA) provides assurance to both staff and customers that testing taking place at your laboratory provides accurate and reliable results. Problems can be identified early on and corrective action can be untaken. The reliability of methods, materials, and equipment can be evaluated and training can be developed and its impact monitored. Our laboratory conducts EQA for selected health facilities in our catchment depending up on our annual plan. We use all three methods namely Random blind rechecking (for Malaria & AFB microscopy),Onsite evaluation ( for malaria,TB, Gene expert ,HIV testing) and Panel testing (for Malaria & HIV testing).The number and type of Health facility addressed by the stated methods depends up on our annual plan which in turn depends on budget, logistics and manpower.

Supportive supervision is a process of helping staff to improve their own work performance continuously. It is carried out in a respectful and non-authoritarian way with a focus on using supervisory visits as an opportunity to improve knowledge and skills of health staff. It focuses on monitoring performance towards goals, and using data for decision-making. We do supervisions to health facilities jointly with different stake holds and sometimes separately especially in areas of Expert EID and viral load utilizations, documentation and communications.

In our country, there is gap of system to provide bottled reagents to each facility especially for reagents used in AFB microscopy. One of the responsibilities given to our laboratory is to receive different powder chemicals, prepare it and distribute to laboratories that use the reagent through zonal health departments. We usually prepare and distribute AFB and Malaria microscopy reagent namely Zn/FM for AFB and Giemsa reagent for malaria microscopy service.