Uganda's laboratories scoop prestigious Awards

Makerere University -Johns Hopkins University Laboratory (MU-JHU) and Central public health laboratory (CPHL) have scooped prestigious Awards for best practice in laboratory medicine.

The Laboratories were awarded by the African Society of Laboratory Medicine (ASLM) during the 3^rd International conference held in Cape Town in 2016.

Speaking during a press briefing at the Uganda Media Centre, health minister Dr Jane Ruth Acheng said these Awards reflect government's efforts to strengthening laboratory services to take on their central place in healthcare delivery.

The particular best practice for which MU-JHU laboratory received the award was titled 'World Class monitoring and appraisal of quality indicators'.

Acheng said, this means that the system developed and used by the MU-JHU laboratory to identify benchmarks for monitoring the expectations of patients, clinicians, researchers as well as the effectiveness and efficiency of internal processes, was found to demonstrate greater quality improvement outcomes in comparison to the best known international standards.

She further said Uganda was also selected to have the best National viral load strategy and the most efficient viral load laboratory.

"Uganda's viral load strategy has seen the country scale up viral load nationally in less than two years. Among the countries that started implementing viral load monitoring at the same time with Uganda, most of them have not even reached half of national coverage," she said.

She added that all the targets that were set for Uganda by development partners were always surpassed and sometimes by more than double. "Having attained international accreditation, these two laboratories now match any standard laboratory world over," Aceng said.

In 2012, Uganda's CPHL Early Infant Diagnosis, MU-JHU/IDI laboratory and the Tuberculosis (TB) won all the three wards.

In 2014 Uganda's CPHL Sample Transport System and UVRI Haemorrhagic fever laboratory won two of the three awards given in the Best Practice category.

Patrick Karugaba, Quality manager MU-JHU core Laboratory said they won an award because the system helped them to have very accurate results by more than 99 %, adding that the results were always reliable and were received within expected time.

Among the tests they do Viral Load tests, CD4 cell counts and other specialised tests.

The head of CPHL Steven Aisu said, this is a good step for the people of Uganda and it means that somebody out there is recognizing the work done in the labs in this country.