North Delhi Pathology Clinic Gets URS - UKAS Certification

EHM News Bureau

North Delhi Pathology Clinic (NDPC) of Delhi was certified by URS - UKAS for proficiency testing support on July 13, 2006. NDPC under Dr Rakesh Sharma is also India's first medical laboratory to have accreditation of ISO:15189 standard by NABL.

Dr Rakesh is against commercialisation of diagnostics. He feels that by helping the pathologist fraternity, which has a membership of 108 spread all over India, at least 10,000-20,000 patients are benefited. Cascading effect of his vision has reflection on almost 30 million tests per year performed by participants in proficiency testing. Ultimate beneficiary of his contribution are the common men.

Incidentally, the VILAC (Voluntary Inter Laboratory Comparison), Proficiency Testing Programme for clinical laboratories, of the Association of Practising Pathologists, was awarded ISO 9001:2000 Certification on June 15, 2006 by United Registrar of Systems Somerset UK - an agency accredited by United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UKAS- sole national body for accreditation recognised by British Government). According to Dr Sharma who is also the Chief Co-ordinator of VILAC, "VILAC is an established and vary useful programme for quality conscious pathologists who use it to test proficiency of all the processes: starting from collection of sample to release of the report, of their laboratories." This comprehensive proficiency-testing programme was designed to cover external quality assurance requirements of almost all the fields of laboratory testing—hematology, biochemistry, immunoassays and microbiology. Besides routine tests, VILAC provides external quality support for certain sophisticated tests, which are available only in a few very experienced programme that are available separately.