How Do We Ensure Quality in Our Laboratories

In order to ensure quality in our laboratories, we can introduce quality procedures. The following factors must be considered and action implemented  

Instrument qualification. This step is a means of measuring an instrument s quality and ensures that we have consistent instrument performance. This is of prime importance in forensic science analyses because we need to be sure that the results that we are reporting are consistent. For example, consider that we have obtained a value for the presence of morphine in blood that is indicative of a lethal concentration later that day, we run the sample again, on the same instrument, and find that the value we have determined on this occasion is half that of the original. This is a very extreme scenario nonetheless, we must be able to show that the instrument we are using for our analyses will give us the same results each time we carry out the work (an acceptable level of error will usually be associated with the value that we report and be outlined in an SOP). A number of steps are involved in instrument qualification design qualification (DQ), operation qualification (OQ), and performance qualification (PQ) these are explained in Chapter 8. 

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