Bridging knowledge gaps in Zambia

On the Association for Diagnostics & Laboratory Medicine’s (ADLM’s, formerly AACC’s) second visit to Zambia for a joint workshop with the Biomedical Society of Zambia (BMSZ), Africa Working Group members Roa Harb, MD, and Anthony Okorodudu, PhD, met a quality manager at Livingstone University Teaching Hospital who had drawn on ideas from the first workshop to support a community of laboratorians and increase her capacity to reach an audience of her peers.

Mukoshya Kalunga, BSc, oversees her laboratory’s quality processes and is a mentor for quality management systems and hematology. She enjoys the fact that her position involves a variety of work, including learning new aspects of the accreditation process, implementing quality systems, and reviewing patient result reports.

But she faces her own challenges in the lab. The ADLM/BMSZ 2023 workshop on the risk-based approach to quality control and quality management for point-of-care-testing offered some solutions. The workshop, she said, “where Professor Olajumoke came, helped me understand areas where I was struggling.”

Sharing in her WhatsApp group was not enough for Kalunga. She sought to offer knowledge more broadly and was set to give a workshop in 2024 at a reference laboratory, which, at the time, was setting up its quality management system.

The ADLM/BMSZ 2024 workshop “Best Practices in Laboratory Quality Improvement” came at the perfect time to help her prepare. It gave her a new perspective on quality management. “The field of science is dynamic,” she said. “How we were trained [in the workshop] on how to do our quality controls is different from what we had been taught. Not very different, but we were taught more, there was more knowledge that was given to us [by Dr. Harb and Dr. Okorodudu]."

Harb and Okorodudu’s workshop helped improve her understanding of quality management, which in turn made it easier for her to teach others about it at the reference laboratory. “It would be easy,” she explained, “because I understand it [with] a much broader perspective, and narrowing it down for people that are just starting was easy [to do].”

The biggest success came from not just sharing the information but actively applying it. Kalunga’s colleagues implemented Harb’s approach to recalculating means with Levey-Jennings charts, and the change is now working for them.

Okorodudu’s lecture on method verification is also making an impact. They employ his method by comparing their own notes and resources with those from his presentation to see how they can best implement his recommendations.

Kalunga will continue to be involved in such programs. She likes to be challenged by new information and in work like hers — dynamic and filled with emerging situations — such educational opportunities offer challenges that she is ready to take on.