International Symposium Aims to Improve Lab Medicine

A clinical laboratory education and accreditation organization called COLA (Columbia, MD, USA) convened its first International Symposium (Baltimore, MD, USA) from July 30-August 1, 2006, to discuss the role of laboratory medicine in relation to public-health needs and crises. The two-day symposium dealt with the future of quality in medical laboratory testing.

Participants in the symposium included public health leaders from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, Atlanta, Georgia, USA), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (Washington, DC, USA), the World Medical Association (Ferney-Voltaire, France), the World Health Organization (WHO, Geneva, Switzerland), and other government and industry leaders from countries around the world.

"We need to understand where we are in the world as a first step, and to find out some of the common threads--issues we all share--around the world,” said Doug Beigel, CEO of COLA. "My insight is that leaders will emerge from different parts of the world to bring about quality in laboratory medicine.”

The group acknowledged that medical laboratories are the critical front line in diagnosis and treatment of diseases. A few major underlying themes of the meeting were lab quality and standards, the need to focus on the healthcare system in its entirety as opposed to specific diseases, and specific needs of labs around the world. Some of the specific topics discussed were the relevance of laboratory standards and training needs to laboratory personnel and the region; the misplaced focus on programs and funding for diseases rather than for entire healthcare systems; the lack of patient-centered standards and systems; the need for integration of the entire healthcare system; and the increasing role of governments in ensuring laboratory quality and information.



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