Evaluation of quality control viral load HIV results from two laboratories in Maputo, after the 3rd Congress of Laboratory Quality Control for Portuguese-Speaking Countries, Mozambique

Abstract

The Project of Laboratory Quality Improvement for Portuguese Speaking Countries (ProMeQuaLab) is based on three major work tools: education, training and monitoring of quality control measures, in order to build capacity to implement and sustain good laboratory practices. Since 2015, a biennial congress on quality control is organised which includes also courses in this field. The third edition of the Congress was held in Mozambique in May 2019. Theoretical and practical courses concerning internal (CQI) and external quality control (EQA), calculation of Total Error (TE) and Measurement Uncertainty (MU) were held. Two practical work sessions were organized, with the trainers of the quality control courses and trainees from two laboratories, Centro Criança Dream (Dream) and Laboratório de Virologia Molecular (INS) in Maputo (Mozambique), to applied the statistical tools to evaluate their quality control results of viral load HIV from 2018. Evaluation of viral load is strongly recommended by WHO for monitoring response to retroviral treatment. The objective of this work was the implementation of the concepts and tools of the assessment of bias and uncertainty presented in the quality control courses and their application on the quantitative quality control results from 2018 of RNA viral load HIV-1 from two laboratories from Maputo. The concepts and tools presented in quality control courses were applied to quality control results of two laboratories in Maputo (Mozambique) for the measure of imprecision, bias and measurement uncertainty. The courses and the work sessions have proved to be very effective in transferring knowledge and skills and therefore should be continued with other laboratories. The results of the bias and measurement uncertainty show that the INS laboratory (Cobas Ampliprep TaqMan96) had a better performance in comparison to the Dream laboratory (Abbott m2000). Effort must be made to continue the education program, namely the interpretation of the quality control results to achieve an improvement of the evaluation of patient results.N/