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New Series: Patient Safety Medical errors do not only occur in the laboratory, but pose a direct threat to patient safety. The clinical laboratory is an integral part of care, and the results of analytics are an essential component of informed decision-making for clinicians. Efforts to avoid laboratory errors, especially minimizing pre- and postanalytical errors, are in the responsibility of laboratory professionals.The new handbook series with the international known editors Oswald Sonntag and Mario Plebani fills a vacancy in the relevant and promising area of patient safety and quality assurance.

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Every clinical laboratory devotes considerable resources to Quality Control. Recently, the advent of concepts such as Analytical Goals, Biological Variation, Six Sigma and Risk Management has generated a renewed interest in the way to perform QC.However, laboratory QC practices remain highly non-standardized and a lot of QC questions are left unanswered. The objective of this book is to propose a roadmap for the application of an integrated QC protocol that ensures the safety of patient results in the everyday lab routine.

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Jeremie M. Gras, Clinique St. Luc Bouge,Belgium.

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