About EQA

With the rise of emerging diseases and global health challenges, ensuring diagnostic excellence is no longer optional – it is essential, with EQA as a crucial step in building a strong public health response.
External Quality Assessment (EQA) is a pillar of quality assurance (QA), playing a vital role in ensuring accurate, consistent, and reliable laboratory testing. By enabling the detection and correction of errors, EQA safeguards against incorrect diagnoses and adverse outcomes, while promoting reproducible and comparable results across laboratories.

While there are several types of EQA (rechecking, supervision, proficiency testing), participation in a proficiency testing (PT) program will provide your laboratory with valuable data and information. It will allow you to compare performance and test results in different sites and/or performance at an international or regional level. The PT program serves as an early warning detection signal for systematic issues and a source of objective evidence of testing quality. Areas requiring improvement and specific training needs will be clearly identified, enabling targeted interventions and continuous quality enhancement.

IQLS PT Programs

To support laboratories in strengthening diagnostic quality, IQLS currently organizes and manages PT programs focused on two critical pathogens, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

For Tuberculosis

• Microscopy (ZN-light, fluorescence-auramine)
• Identification (Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex, Non-Tuberculosis Mycobacteria)
• Drug sensitivity testing (first line, second line including MDRTB)
  • Polymerase Chain Reaction – PCR
  • Line Probe Assay – LPA
  • GeneXpert

For Malaria

• Microscopy (routine light microscopy for Malaria detection)
• Speciation
• Parasitemia determination (WHO-recommended method)

Why choose IQLS services?

• Worldwide experience: currently 30 labs in 25 resource-limited countries are enrolled in IQLS EQA programs
• Flexibility: all conditions including costs and periodicity are flexible and customizable to your laboratory’s or technician’s needs and capacities
• Wide variety of specimens: simulated sputum, stained or unstained slides, original specimen, decontaminated or inactivated, lyophilized…etc
• Constant help and support to laboratories facing diagnosis problems, help for root cause analysis and provision of potential solutions
• Dedicated Point of Contact, EQA program coordinator, ensuring regular follow-up
• Comprehensive and attractive reporting to follow the evolution of your performance, at an individual (technician or laboratory) and general (laboratory or group of laboratories) level
• Secured multilingual online interface for Laboratory Data Management (participant data entry and organizer program management, including statistics and reports)
• All schemes are organized according to the ISO17043 standard, specific training for EQA organizers can be provided
• Delivery of certificates of participation and good performance