CLINICAL DIAGNOSIS THE NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES OF DIAGNOSTIC ERRORS IN LABORATORY PRACTICE AND THE RELEVANCE OF THEIR ELIMINATION

One prominent form of medical error and avoidable iatrogenic injury is diagnostic error, which includes missed, delayed, or incorrect diagnosis. Diagnostic errors may result from mistakes made during the laboratory testing procedure. The purpose of this retrospective study of voluntary event reports was to look into the types, reasons, and clinical effects of errors—including diagnostic errors—that occur during clinical laboratory testing. A number of papers published in the past 20 years have brought laboratory professionals' attention to the pre- and post-analytical phases, which currently seem to be more susceptible to errors than the analytical phase. This is true even though the frequency of laboratory errors varies greatly, depending on the study design and steps of the entire testing process investigated.