World Patient Safety Day is observed annually on 17 September. This year’s theme, Safe care for noncommunicable diseases, highlights the importance of safe and reliable care throughout the patient journey.
Laboratory medicine plays an essential role in that journey, as laboratory results influence diagnoses, treatment decisions and patient monitoring. Ensuring the quality of testing therefore means looking beyond analytical performance alone: the entire testing pathway must support appropriate clinical decisions and better outcomes for patients.
At Labquality Days 2027, an international session dedicated to patient safety will explore how laboratory medicine can contribute to safer care from several perspectives.
The programme examines how unwarranted variation and failures across the testing pathway can affect patients, as well as the importance of harmonised units, reliable decision limits and appropriate reference intervals. Speakers will also discuss how external quality assessment can be used to evaluate individual competence, including image-based EQA and the comparison of pathologists with a trained image-analysis algorithm.
The session will then turn to patient-centric EQA: how quality assessment can move beyond measuring analytical accuracy to consider the clinical impact of laboratory results. Minimum retest intervals and their role in appropriate test utilisation will also be addressed.
The session concludes with a panel discussion on how laboratories, EQA providers, healthcare professionals, the IVD industry and other key stakeholders can work together to enhance patient safety.
The session brings together international experts Martin Myers, Martina Zaninotto, Thomas Streichert, Marith van Schrojenstein Lantman, Emilia Svala, Jonna Pelanti, Rachel Marrington and Anna Linko-Parvinen.
Join the discussion at Labquality Days on 11 February 2027 in Helsinki!