Running of Standards in Clinical Chemistry and the Use of the Control Chart

Abstract

The progress of clinical medicine has been con-siderably aided in the past few decades by the increased number of laboratory tests available and the improvement in their specificity and accuracy. Nevertheless, the reliability of analy-tical results from clinical laboratories has been questioned by many individuals, and several inde-pendent surveys have more than justified the suspicion (Belk and Sunderman, 1947; Shuey and Cebel, 1949). In these surveys blame has been placed on poor supervision of personnel, poorly trained and in-sufficient personnel, poor equipment, poor choice of methods available, and so on. The vast majority of clinical chemical analyses are and