ASSESSMENT OF QUALITY SYSTEM ESSENTIALS AND COMPLIANCE OF GOVERNMENT HOSPITAL LABORATORIES IN THE NATIONAL CAPITAL REGION, PHILIPPINES
The majority of people in the Philippines patronized the services of government hospitals with particular emphasis on affordability and health care services, including laboratory tests. Laboratories are a crucial component of hospitals and should provide accurate results. To deliver reliable findings, laboratories comply with standardized quality management essentials. The standards include detailed instructions about the laboratory setting, human resources, tools, and supplies. This study investigates the level of compliance of national government hospitals with the existing quality management essentials before the pandemic. Government hospitals in the National Capital Region (NCR) were assessed by employing surveys and interviews with key laboratory personnel. The results show that hospital laboratories in NCR largely complied with the implementation of quality system essentials, particularly with the local licensure standards but significantly lower in compliance with WHO standards. The compliance rating of each indicator within the quality system essential is substantially different from one hospital laboratory to another; however, since the quality improvement process is a system of interconnected indicators, the lower-rated compliance indicators were significantly pulled by the higher-rated compliance. From the observation, a continuous improvement model is crucial for the standard examination of laboratories in the country for a persistent rise in medical services accessible and reliable for Filipinos.
Laboratory, quality management essentials, quality assessment, government hospitals, Philippines