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Quality control and quality assurance in histopathology : the development and in-use assessment of a multi-parameter audit system for diagnostic surgical pathology

Quality control and quality assurance in histopathology : the development and in-use assessment of a multi-parameter audit system for diagnostic surgical pathology
Quality control and quality assurance in histopathology : the development and in-use assessment of a multi-parameter audit system for diagnostic surgical pathology

A histopathological or tissue diagnosis is one of the prerequisites for correct patient management. The quality of these diagnoses is therefore critical to patient care, and this thesis describes a practical study of quality assessment methods in diagnostic histopathology. I established an internal peer review-based adult system at Southampton and over a five year period examined the quality of diagnosis, speed of reporting and several other parameters in 1318 randomly-selected cases. Additionally I carried out an assessment of the changes in diagnosis and patient management resulting from specialist review of 416 selected cases at clinico-pathological meetings.

The study yielded valuable information on the level of errors in pathological diagnoses. These was a 3.4% error rate in the randomly-selected cases; errors that could have affected patient management were found in 1.4%. In the cases specifically selected for review 10.3% of diagnoses were refined and 8.9% were altered; major management changes resulted in 4.1%. My findings indicate that both random and selected case review can be useful in assessing histopathological quality, and suggest that quality measures of this sort should be built in to the working practices of pathology laboratories.

University of Southampton
Ramsay, Alan Drummond
Ramsay, Alan Drummond

Ramsay, Alan Drummond (1996) Quality control and quality assurance in histopathology : the development and in-use assessment of a multi-parameter audit system for diagnostic surgical pathology. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Record type: Thesis (Doctoral)

Abstract

A histopathological or tissue diagnosis is one of the prerequisites for correct patient management. The quality of these diagnoses is therefore critical to patient care, and this thesis describes a practical study of quality assessment methods in diagnostic histopathology. I established an internal peer review-based adult system at Southampton and over a five year period examined the quality of diagnosis, speed of reporting and several other parameters in 1318 randomly-selected cases. Additionally I carried out an assessment of the changes in diagnosis and patient management resulting from specialist review of 416 selected cases at clinico-pathological meetings.

The study yielded valuable information on the level of errors in pathological diagnoses. These was a 3.4% error rate in the randomly-selected cases; errors that could have affected patient management were found in 1.4%. In the cases specifically selected for review 10.3% of diagnoses were refined and 8.9% were altered; major management changes resulted in 4.1%. My findings indicate that both random and selected case review can be useful in assessing histopathological quality, and suggest that quality measures of this sort should be built in to the working practices of pathology laboratories.

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Published date: 1996

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Local EPrints ID: 459962
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/459962
PURE UUID: 63dffb37-80f3-4ca3-a754-a3f06aea9712

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Date deposited: 04 Jul 2022 17:30
Last modified: 04 Jul 2022 17:30

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Author: Alan Drummond Ramsay

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