Achieving, maintaining and improving accuracy, timeliness and reliability are major challenges for health laboratories. Countries worldwide committed themselves to build national capacities for the detection of, and response to, public health events of international concern when they decided to engage in the International Health Regulations implementation process. Only sound management of quality in health laboratories will enable countries to produce test results that the international community will trust in cases of international emergency. This handbook was developed through collaboration between the WHO Lyon Office for National Epidemic Preparedness and Response, the United States of America Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Division of Laboratory Systems, and the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI). It is based on training sessions and modules provided by the CDC and WHO in more than 25 countries, and on guidelines for implementation of ISO 15189 in diagnostic laboratories, developed by CLSI. This handbook is intended to provide a comprehensive reference on Laboratory Quality Management System for all stakeholders in health laboratory processes, from management, to administration, to bench-work laboratorians. This handbook covers topics that are essential for quality management of a public health or clinical laboratory. They are based on both ISO 15189 and CLSI GP26-A3 documents. Each topic is discussed in a separate chapter. The chapters follow the framework developed by CLSI and are organized as the "12 Quality System Essentials".

Establishing and maintaining laboratory quality standards are essential to generate reliable results to support clinical and public health actions. The Laboratory Quality Standardspresent a minimum set of standards that can be readily adapted by countries and applied to laboratories at every level of the health-care system. This book also outlines mechanism to implement them. This book will be of help to national policy-makers as well as regulators in developing national laboratory quality standards. It provides a simple approach to meet the minimum requirements set with the ultimate objective to comply with ISO 15189 in a logical and step-by-step manner.

When is it appropriate to return individual research results to participants? The immense interest in this question has been fostered by the growing movement toward greater transparency and participant engagement in the research enterprise. Yet, the risks of returning individual research resultsâ€"such as results with unknown validityâ€"and the associated burdens on the research enterprise are competing considerations. Returning Individual Research Results to Participants reviews the current evidence on the benefits, harms, and costs of returning individual research results, while also considering the ethical, social, operational, and regulatory aspects of the practice. This report includes 12 recommendations directed to various stakeholdersâ€"investigators, sponsors, research institutions, institutional review boards (IRBs), regulators, and participantsâ€"and are designed to help (1) support decision making regarding the return of results on a study-by-study basis, (2) promote high-quality individual research results, (3) foster participant understanding of individual research results, and (4) revise and harmonize current regulations.

This book is a comprehensive and timely compilation of strategy, methods, and implementation of a proof of concept modified quality module of Good Laboratory Practices (GLP). This text provides a historical overview of GLP and related standards of quality assurance practices in clinical testing laboratories as well as basic research settings. It specifically discusses the need and challenges in audit, documentation, and strategies for its implications in system-dependent productivity striving research laboratories. It also describes the importance of periodic training of study directors as well as the scholars for standardization in research processes. This book describes different documents required at various time points of a successful Ph.D and post-doc tenure along with faculty training besides entire lab establishments. Various other areas including academic social responsibility and quality assurance in the developing world, lab orientations, and communication, digitization in data accuracy, auditability and back traceability have also been discussed. This book will be a preferred source for principal investigators, research scholars, and industrial research centers globally. From the foreword by Ratan Tata, India “This book will be a guide for students and professionals alike in quality assurance practices related to clinical research labs. The historical research and fundamental principles make it a good tool in clinical research environments. The country has a great need for such a compilation in order to increase the application of domestic capabilities and technology”