Evaluation of the Sigma Quality level for Serum Iron determination by two colorimetric methods, Ferrozine and Ferene S

Iron plays important functions in the body such as the formation and functioning of hemoglobin and it’s disorders are among the most common diseases of human1. It is essential to ensure that its levels determination through laboratory tests are accurate and precise. The participation of laboratories in the External Quality Assessment (EQA) allows the increases of the quality level of the laboratory results and improvement of its performance.2This study was developed in the Portuguese Nacional EQA Program (PNAEQ) concerning the laboratories results from the Clinical Chemistry Scheme. The main objective of this study was to evaluate and improve the sigma quality level regarding the Iron parameter and reduce the variability of the laboratories results participating in the EQA program of Clinical Chemistry of the Nacional External Quality Assessment Program (PNAEQ). The mean Sigma quality level indicated that the Ferrozine method had a better performance compared with Ferene S method. Half of the control samples had a sigma quality level higher than 3.0, which is set as the minimum acceptable quality.3 Despite of the improved of the Sigma quality level in the Pilot Test, the results demonstrated a need to improved the analytical process performance and to identified more potential causes and implement new improvement actions. It becomes necessary to raise awareness with the laboratories, improving the Pilot Test participation frequency, resulting in a recurrent and current assessment of the laboratory activity performance. Developing Six Sigma projects on a periodic basis is important for continuously and progressively increasing the level of Sigma quality in laboratory examinations. The main advantage of quality assessment on the sigma scale is providing evidence of overall laboratory performance, taking into account random and systematic errors.N/

A PASport to Service Quality

Part 1 of this article discussed the current service quality environment in which academic libraries find themselves operating, and the challenge for staff performance assessment as an integral element of maintaining and improving effective service quality levels. As referenced in Part 1, Millson-Martula and Menon in a 1999 article in College and Research Libraries suggest that no effort to enhance customer satisfaction will succeed unless students and faculty are convinced that library staff, as service providers, care about the quality of service they provide and the manner in which they do it. However, library staff will not demonstrate a high degree of commitment and caring unless they believe that library management cares about the staff as well. Simply put, customer satisfaction equals employee satisfaction. [Millson-Martula and Menon, p.46]. It is difficult to separate employee satisfaction from appropriate performance assessment. But this performance appraisal must be found in the context of a larger effort which includes staff interpersonal understanding (connection), service evaluation, personal and professional development opportunities, and appropriate recognition. Without those, performance assessment alone could appear to be punitive. It is in this broader context that the performance assessment system, PASport, was developed at the Centennial Library

Framework for Evaluation of the IT&C Audit Metrics Impact

The paper defines an assessment system for performance of IT&C audit process. The analytical models of performance indicators are provided together with the interpretation of their results. Performance levels catch the quality characteristics of the audit processes carried out for distributed informatics systems. Also, the paper presents a performance assessment framework for audit processes and a performance audit methodology. The impact of performance indicators is defined as the organization’s income after performance audit recommendation implementing. Methods and techniques for performance assessment are provided for audit processes of the distributed informatics system. The impact levels of performance indicators are calculated before implementation of the performance recommendation and after that to establish whether the performance audit increases the quality of IT&C audit processes.Performance Metrics, Metric Impact, Audit Process

Full Reference Objective Quality Assessment for Reconstructed Background Images

With an increased interest in applications that require a clean background image, such as video surveillance, object tracking, street view imaging and location-based services on web-based maps, multiple algorithms have been developed to reconstruct a background image from cluttered scenes. Traditionally, statistical measures and existing image quality techniques have been applied for evaluating the quality of the reconstructed background images. Though these quality assessment methods have been widely used in the past, their performance in evaluating the perceived quality of the reconstructed background image has not been verified. In this work, we discuss the shortcomings in existing metrics and propose a full reference Reconstructed Background image Quality Index (RBQI) that combines color and structural information at multiple scales using a probability summation model to predict the perceived quality in the reconstructed background image given a reference image. To compare the performance of the proposed quality index with existing image quality assessment measures, we construct two different datasets consisting of reconstructed background images and corresponding subjective scores. The quality assessment measures are evaluated by correlating their objective scores with human subjective ratings. The correlation results show that the proposed RBQI outperforms all the existing approaches. Additionally, the constructed datasets and the corresponding subjective scores provide a benchmark to evaluate the performance of future metrics that are developed to evaluate the perceived quality of reconstructed background images.Comment: Associated source code: https://github.com/ashrotre/RBQI, Associated Database: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1bg8YRPIBcxpKIF9BIPisULPBPcA5x-Bk?usp=sharing (Email for permissions at: ashrotreasuedu

A catalogue quality audit tool

The current need for performance measurement and quality targets for services to users requires suitable performance indicators for libraries to use. This paper looks at the self-assessment audit tool for catalogue quality developed by UKOLN in collaboration with Essex libraries. For the tool a checklist of errors was drawn up, which can then be used to assess the quality of records within a catalogue using a sample of library stock. The tool can be used to assess the quality of catalogue records for monographs and non-book materials (but not serials), for complete collections or parts of collections and for records created at different periods. This paper describes the tool and the process of making the assessment and reports on the results of the pilot study carried out at the University of Bath Library in 2000