Clinical Laboratory Service scores high and achieves full accreditation

Kingston General Hospital’s clinical laboratories were put under the microscope recently, and came out shining, achieving a full four-year accreditation after a mandatory Ontario Laboratory Accreditation (OLA) process.

A team of eight peer assessors and a staff co-ordinator spent three days here in January, evaluating our many different labs on their processes, procedures and systems.

“Each of our 11 labs successfully demonstrated compliance with 497 requirements,” says Joyce deVette-McPhail, Director of Clinical Laboratory Services.“To achieve the results that we did truly shows the level of dedication and commitment that our staff display on a daily basis.”

There were many improvements on our overall accreditation results compared to our last audit four years ago. We scored higher particularly in the areas of general employee safety, departmental safety, safety with chemicals and patient safety. We also improved in the area of documentation.

“We met more standards this time, even though the bar the provincial accreditors set is higher than ever,” says Dr. Sandip SenGupta, Medical Director of Clinical Laboratory Services.

Along with more requirements to meet, the on-site assessors also fanned out across the hospital to talk with staff to see for themselves how our laboratory policies and processes work.

“The process was much more thorough this time and we expect it to be even more stringent in four years' time. That's continuous quality improvement in action,” says SenGupta.

To stay ahead of the curve, KGH will be focusing on areas where the assessors identified opportunities for improvement. Among them are how we carry out point-of-care testing, such as urine testing and analysis and glucose meter work in all of our front-line patient-care areas.

“We've made great progress on this so far, but we know we have work to do to support our clinical colleagues to make sure they are ready and able to follow all the policy and procedures pertaining to point-of-care testing,” says SenGupta.

Click here to see a video from inside the laboratories at KGH.