GHS Is Rolling Out National Laboratories Quality Assurance Project

The Ghana Health Service has announced it is rolling out a program to ensure laboratories that test for Covid-19 produce reliable and incontrovertible results.

Under the program, laboratories in the country engaged in Covid-19 testing will be supervised under very strict quality control.

“Because we have a network of laboratories, testing thousands of samples, it is important to have a quality assurance system, to check the reliability of the results and the accuracy of the tests that are being done by the different labs using sometimes different kits and machines, but all producing a result that the person has covid or not,” said Prof. William Ampofo, Virologist at the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research.

He was speaking to the press at the launch of the program.

The national laboratory quality assurance program and data management for Covid-19, is being implemented by the Ghana Health Service with support from PharmAccess.

Under the program, laboratories undertaking Covid-19 tests will be accredited. “all the labs in the network will receive a fully-characterized panel with results already known to the committee, and the results from these labs will be matched against the original results. We would also administer a questionnaire to check if the staff are well-trained and if the processes being undertaken plus the data reporting processes are what they have to be,” Prof. Ampofo told journalists.