The third in his Pathology in Practice series of articles on internal quality control, which will appear in the February 2019 issue, will see Stephen MacDonald continue his overview of process design with a look at defining process stability and setting target values.
In the previous article in this series (December 2018 issue, page 27) Stephen discussed the desirable properties of internal quality control (IQC) material, and now moves on to how it should be used. He will consider two aspects: first, quantifying the innate instability of the process to define expected performance; and second, the ability to detect when the process deviates from what is expected. He will discuss defining the process stability and setting target values, with monitoring of performance following in Article 4, scheduled to appear in the April issue.