Labquality Days: A Quality Adventure

Labquality Days: A Quality Adventure

Over the last while I have had the opportunity to attend a number of laboratory quality oriented conferences; Laboratory Quality Confab in San Antonio (held this year in New Orleans), Seeding Knowledge conference in Jeddah, our own POLQM Laboratory Quality Conference in Vancouver, and most recently LabQuality Days in Helsinki Finland.  Each has been a unique experience and each equally excellent with its own features. 

Of the group, LabQuality Days has had the longest run; this year was the 43^rd holding, going back to 1973, apparently without a break.  I could be wrong, but that must be the longest run for a medical laboratory quality oriented conference anywhere in the world.  

Apparently over the years there have been both lean and abundant attendances.  This year there were about 500 people split into two simultaneous sub-conferences, one held in Finnish, and the other in English.  The Helsinki Conference held the session without any difficulty.  

I can’t speak about the Finnish conference in large part because my facility in Finnish is non-existent.  (Apparently I am not alone.  I am told that the only place where Finnish is spoken is in Finland.)  But I can say that as I walked by their sessions in the main auditorium it was always full.  The international conference was held in a smaller room for about 200 people and it was always well attended as well.

The international conference had a dual theme: Pre-analytics and Point of Care; two topics with a lot of current interest, obviously with widespread appeal.  The speakers were widely distributed from Canada (me), Australia, and an array from across Europe including Norway, Denmark, Germany, Portugal, Lithuania, UK, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.  Apparently that was only a small subset of the total group distribution; in total there were folks from 26 different countries.   

I probably shouldn’t speak for others, but I leaned tons, and was really happy that I had attended.  

The meeting was started by the keynote speaker Bruce Oreck (a former American Ambassador to Finland) who talked about the state of highly disruptive change that is impacting business in general and by inference the medical laboratory.  Bruce is not the first speaker to raise the topic, but certainly was very effective.

To my mind, the person from who I learned the most was Anne Stavelin, from the EQA/PT program in Norway (NOKLUS) who was very much in the disruptive mode herself.  Norway was recognized that the primary user of Point of Care tests is NOT the hospital laboratory or emergency department, but is the family docs in the community, and also recognizes that they also have an obligation to be competent and deserve the opportunity to learn through quality assessment.  Astoundingly in a country of 5 million people, NOKLUS has almost 5 thousand clients participating in EQA associated with POCT.  For the arithmetically challenged, that means that close to one out of every 1000 people (0.1percent) living in Norway is involved in quality assessment.  The mind boggles.   

For the anatomic pathology folks Pedro Soares de Oliveira from Portugal was pretty disruptive as well as he talked about how much the preparation of glass slide samples for pathology analysis continues to be an “art “ rather than a “science” still dependent on touch and feeling rather than precision and standardization.  I wonder how one would calculate the measurement uncertainty of the impact of sample reading and interpretation and diagnosis.  Clearly the times, they are a-changing very soon

I am really happy that I have had the opportunity to be introduced to this meeting.  Better late than never.  This will not be a one-off attendance.

A warning to folks not living in northern climes; the weather is not nice, but the hospitality  and meeting  and greeting and learning opportunities abound and far out way the inconveniences of some rain, or snow and cold.

PS:  We will be continuing to host our POLQM Medical Laboratory Quality Conferences  in October in Vancouver.  I am not sure that we will hold 43 conferences under my management, but maybe with my successor?

Attending Quality Conferences

Julia McIntosh of the American Society for Quality has created a really nice summary on why attending meetings promotes networking [see: http://asq.org/blog/2015/04/the-pros-and-cons-of-conferences/ ].  And many thanks for pointing to my blog on one of the challenges of meeting travel [see http://www.medicallaboratoryquality.com/2014/07/quality-standardization-and-mh17.html ]. 

To be clear, let me underscore that I absolutely agree with Julia.  First and foremost, I know there are some inherent risks, but on greater balance, attending meetings is  critically important to Quality and Communication.  As the old adage goes “the most important part of a meeting is that people meet”. 

When people get together, creative juices flow and innovation and collaboration and synergy opportunities abound.  It is tough (but certainly not impossible) to duplicate that over a telephone or by watching and participating through a computer or tablet screen.

But it is also fair to say that meetings can have costs which have to go into the planning mix.  Yes, even attending meetings is a Deming PDSA opportunity. 

You can’t be in two places at the same time, and sometimes urgent things can happen while you are way, and the longer the meeting, the greater the risk.  Also, it is pretty clear that the more flight legs it takes to get to a meeting, the higher the probability of a problem.  Lost luggage, missed connections, jet lag, and common colds, phlebitis, and more recently it seems, measles, can mess up your meeting.  And let’s not even talk about flying in or out of the North-east anytime between mid-December to early-March (?) with predictably unpredictable weather. 

And then there are the financials to take into consideration.  In my world, an average 3 day meeting can consume between 4 and 5 thousand dollars, for travel, hotel, registration and per diem costs.   

So I can agree that attending meetings is important, and you can optimise the up-side benefits and reduce the downside hazards, with the following:

1.    Ensure the meeting is worth the risk.  Are the people that you want to meet or listen to likely to be there?  In my world, ASQ meeting are right up at the top.

2.    And as an extension to the above, if you go to a meeting and talk only to your friends, or even worse, talk to nobody, that is opportunity lost.

3.    Look for meetings in the sweet spot, May-to-October, (maybe avoid August) to reduce risks of weather.

4.    Make it a meeting worth your while by balancing travel time against meeting time.  Do you really want to travel for hours-and-hours just to attend a one-dayer?  And on the other hand, do you really have the time to be away for 4-5 or 6 days?

5.    Look for meetings in locations that you can get to on one or two flights.  More than four flights is probably a guarantee for at least some lost luggage or a missed connection.

6.    And as another extension, look for meetings in places where you might like to visit. 

7.    Look to save some cash.  Book meetings at the Early-bird registration rate.   Usually the meeting hotel is going to give a good discount and sometimes, meals are included as part of the meeting. 

So ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement in Nashville, in a few weeks for most folks in North America would meet all those criteria. 

Where also would be an ideal meeting to consider, if you are in the medical laboratory/healthcare/safety business, is to think about visiting Vancouver BC and the UBC Program Office for Laboratory Quality Management Conference in October 28-30, 2015. 

Visit: http://polqm.ca/conference_2015/home.html

The importance of meetings

The importance of meetings

The importance of meetings is that people meet. Today we have to change that a old adage a bit, because people can also “meet” over video conference and webcast and text conferencing;  all these have value, but from my perspective are not the same as a good old fashioned face-to-face  meeting and having the opportunity to share common live experiences.  

Over the last few days we have been hosting the Quality Management Conference for Medical Laboratories here in Vancouver.  We have about 130 people here, talking, eating, and sharing experience in one room.   The audience included the full spectrum of laboratory professionals interested in laboratory quality.  There were laboratory technologists, administrators, leaders and directors, investigators and consultants, and of course, very important, partners and sponsors.  There were presentations and discussion, agreement and (respectful) disagreement, and good food and entertainment.

It was, from my very biased perspective, a very successful meeting of tangible minds in a live reality experience.

F-t-F meetings are actually becoming a lot harder to orchestrate, at least in Canada because resources for hosting meetings and resources for attending meetings are shrinking.  Both the public sector and private sector are feeling the squeeze.  But laboratory administrations do need to recognize that Quality improvement does not happen in a vacuum; improvement needs to be linked to continuing education.  Education without meetings can and does occur, but books and webcasts and staring at a computer can go only so far.  And while I appreciate that industry is under its own set of pressures from competition and Merger and Acquisition (M&A), cutting off its audience doesn’t make things better; it makes things worse.  A single meeting brings the sponsor together with a hundred or more contacts.  Everybody wins.

There were a number of themes that arose during the two and a half days:

·       There are links between medical laboratory quality and standardization in all its guises.

·       Quality and Safety and Risk and Error are intimately linked and improved through appropriate application of Quality tools

·       The critical role for Quality education at all levels.  (over all consensus is that starting on-the-job is way too late!)

·       Laboratory Quality has huge impact on patient care, and its corollary, patients can and do make their mark on laboratory management through voicing concerns and compliments and complaints. 

More information to follow.

This was not our “first rodeo”; over the years we have put on about 25 conferences.  This was our most ambitious, and from many perspectives, our most successful. 

The presentations will soon all be posted and we will share the link.

Our most immediate task is to make sure people fill in the Evaluation form.  I don’t know why, but getting that part done is often like pulling teeth.  I am hoping that we can get to 15%, but even that may turn out to be a lot of work.

I am starting to think we have to start building in incentives for submitting an evaluation.  I