Bangalore: Do you ever wonder if the syringe used to draw your blood at a diagnostic centre is free of germs? Or whether your blood sample has not been contaminated while being handled in a testing laboratory?

Considering that a large number of medical testing laboratories are mushrooming in the country without any registration or certification, this fear may not be unfounded. With this in view, the Global Medical Laboratories Accreditation Committee (also called the World Lab Forum) has recommended to the Union Government to make accreditation of all clinical laboratories mandatory throughout the country.

The forum was formed at the first International Symposium on "Laboratory Medicine's Response to a World at Risk" organised by COLA, a laboratory accreditation and education organisation, last month at Baltimore, USA.

According to Thuppil Venkatesh, Head of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at St. John's Medical College here, who is heading the global committee, the idea was to impress upon the Government to take up accreditation on a step by step basis to ensure safety of the patient and for better healthcare delivery.

He said the Government was considering certification of laboratories so that minimum standards are maintained. The Quality Council of India, an independent body under the Ministry of Science and Technology had already made accreditation mandatory for Central Government Health Services (CGHS) laboratories. "There are more than one lakh medical testing laboratories in the country, of which only about 100 are accredited, as getting certification or accreditation is only voluntary at present. Ultimately it is the patient who suffers," said Dr. Venkatesh.

He added that in a city like Bangalore, where there were thousands of clinical laboratories, the only requirement to open one was to get a trade licence from the Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BMP). "The risks are many such as infection by re-use of syringes, contamination, wrong diagnosis and so on," he said. In India, accreditation of medical labs is done by the National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL), which follows ISO standards.

Phased approach

Dr.Ventakesh suggested that a phased approach could be taken wherein a lab was first registered, certified and then based on the standards maintained over a period of time, accreditation could be given.

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