Government involvement in quality assurance is becoming the trend in many countries, including New Zealand. What values underpin the systems that evolve in each country, and who has given legitimacy to them? In the context of the prevailing ideology of early childhood, this paper unpacks quality assurance in Australia and comments on the assumptions, taken for granted premises and values which ...

Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) is gaining major importance in the field of medical diagnostics. For example, RT-PCR assays are being tested to become standard methodology for detection of occult tumor cells in peripheral blood of cancer patients. However, there is heterogeneity in the frequency of tumor cell detection, e.g., in melanoma patients as reported in the lite...

Andrology laboratories need to produce reliable results for appropriate diagnostic and health care decisions. Since semen analysis is highly complex and procedurally difficult to standardize, quality control (QC) is essential to detect and correct systematic errors and high variability of results. The large discrepancies between assessments of sperm concentration and morphology in different lab...

The objective of this study was to assess the level of compliance to quality assurance and image quality standards in computed tomography facilities in Kenyan hospitals. A quality assurance inspection and physical image quality assessment in eighteen representative computed tomography facilities were completed. A quantitative method was developed and used to score the results obtained from the ...

International guidelines for ERBB2 (HER2) testing procedures in breast cancer patients highlight the importance of external quality control. In contrast, internal quality assurance programs have been poorly defined, and their clinical significance has not yet been investigated. We developed a quality assurance scheme by performing HER2 FISH on 724 patients randomly selected out of 1996 patients...