Afaal’s Column

It’s been over an year since we started to work on getting the Hospital Laboratory internationally accredited. It is important that as many of our services are certified to internationally accepted standards in order to gain and maintain confidence of the public.

One of the major endeavours for me in managing ADK Hospital is to get such standards in place and get international recognition. So I decided that we should start slow and improve our services to achieve such recognition.

Last year we established a new laboratory and acquired some more machinery and expert staff. With this development I thought that it would only be fitting that we get this lab accredited. On proposing this, my staff was very enthusiastic and they gave me a commitment to make this happen.

Laboratories get two types of accreditation from the International Standards Organization. The ISO 9001:2000 is the Quality Management System Standard and the ISO 15189 is specific to medical laboratories and is a unique standard that takes into consideration the specific requirements of the medical environment and the importance of the medical laboratory to patient care. We decided to initially go to the Quality Management Standard and later go for the more detailed one. In reality, the initial Management Accreditation sets the standard for the other one and hence it will be much easier to get it with this in hand.

In fact, it was a lot of hard work to get all the major core conformities in place. We had to get all protocols, goals, targets, outputs and much more first on paper to ISO requirements. But that is not enough. We had to implement the standards and get the staff trained to apply the standards. This took us a lot of effort and a lot of support from the laboratory staff specially. I do acknowledge and congratulate them for their achievement. We achieved this working as team together. After all this work, on July 20, 2009, the Laboratory was audited for conformities of ISO 9001:2000 with the certification scope of Diagnostic Laboratory Testing and Reporting.

It was a bit of a tense day since the laboratory staff and the management were eagerly and anxiously looking forward to the outcome of the audit. When the final verdict came it was a time of relief and a time for celebration. Yes! Laboratory has successfully completed the requirements and passed the audit for ISO certification. It is indeed a milestone in the endeavour to provide reliable and quality health services to the Maldivian public. The Laboratory is now accredited for the period 30 July 2009 to 29th July 2012. By the end of this period the lab will have to undergo another audit for renewal of its accredited standard.

With this certification, the Laboratory will now operated all its procedures strictly adhering to ISO approved standard operating procedures. These procedures will be continuously reviewed and assessed so that the standards are maintained and the conformities are met in future audit processes.

The partners of ADK Hospital in the certification process were Assistance Maldives Pvt. Ltd, Maldives, affiliated with Nexus Business Solutions Pvt. Ltd, of Sri Lanka. Auditors of the SGS GROUP, Switzerland, conducted the certification audit. SGS is the world’s leading Inspection, Verification, Testing and Certification Company established in 1878.

Achievement of this certification is only a beginning for improvement and maintenance of quality in the laboratory. We will start to further enhance the processes and also put efforts towards certification for the ISO 15189 standards as well. This achievement also paves avenue for the motivation and initiation of certification processes for other departments of the Hospital as well.