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Patient safety and POCT

  • Chapter
Point-of-Care Testing

Abstract

In laboratory medicine quality assessment demands that every step along the total testing chain is performed correctly and accurately to ensure valuable decision-making along with safe and effective patient care. This applies also to POCT. In practice, however, POCT creates other challenges from a risk management perspective, namely analyses performed by non-laboratory personnel, poor quality control, non-conforming quality assessment workflows and great vulnerability in the pre-analytical phase. Even if most laboratory errors do not impact patient outcomes, the potential to injure patients is inherent and, for that reason, every potential risk of error deserves commensurate investigation, response and prevention in order to optimize patient safety.

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Plebani, M. (2018). Patient safety and POCT. In: Luppa, P.B., Junker, R. (eds) Point-of-Care Testing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-54497-6_28

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