5.4 Quality assurance

In an AMR surveillance system, the NCC is tasked with the responsibility of monitoring quality assurance. The work itself is headed by the responsible technical team or technical working group (TWG). The technical team, in liaison with external stakeholders, should ensure standardisation of all processes relating to AMR surveillance across local surveillance sites and at national level. Promotion of standardisation is achieved by providing training by the NCC’s technical teams to laboratory staff and by facilitating the development of internal quality assurance standards at surveillance site laboratories.

Maintaining quality standards includes ensuring that data on isolates (including patient characteristics), AST and population statistics (as detailed in Sections 4.2–4.5) are captured in a standard format by surveillance sites. This extends to core laboratory processes, including isolate identification, susceptibility testing and storage. Quality standard frameworks should be applied at every stage of data handling and manipulation, and, ideally, should involve automated data validity checks, ensuring consistency, completeness and accuracy of data gathered. Quality assurance will be covered further in the course Quality assurance and AMR surveillance.

Quality assurance is a vital part of running an AMR surveillance system. If the AMR information being collected at the local level is not of a high standard and consistency, the eventual output of the whole surveillance system will be unreliable.