Table 1.
Participating laboratories in the two rounds of clinical and environmental EQAP.
Table 2.
Panel composition of the two rounds of clinical EQAP and concordant qualitative results per sample (inter-laboratory reproducibility).
Table 3.
Panel composition of the two rounds of environmental EQAP and concordant results per sample (inter-laboratory reproducibility).
Table 4.
Qualitative results per laboratory of the two rounds of clinical EQAP.
Figure 1.
Concordance expressed as proportion of concordant results of participating laboratories vs. workload expressed as number of clinical samples processed in 2008 (A) and in 2010 (B).
A linear regression analysis identified a non-significant trend towards better performance by laboratories handling high sample volumes (A: p = 0,0830; B: p = 0,1618).
Figure 2.
Intra-laboratory reproducibility expressed as the ratio of correctly analysed clinical sample pairs over the total number of pairs versus workload expressed as number of clinical samples processed in 2008 (A) and in 2010 (B).
A linear regression analysis indicated that the slope of both graphs does not significantly deviate from zero (A: p = 0,3183; B: p = 0,5623).
Figure 3.
A significant correlation exists between the rate of false negative clinical samples versus the detection limit of the PCR-assay (p<0.0001, R2 = 0,7959).
Table 5.
Qualitative results per laboratory of the two rounds of environmental EQAP.