About INSTAND e.V.

INSTAND Society for Promotion of Quality Assurance in Medical Laboratories e. V.

INSTAND e.V. is short for “Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Qualitätssicherung in medizinischen Laboratorien” [in English: Society for Promotion of Quality Assurance in the Medical Laboratories] and is registered as such at the District Court in Freiburg in Breisgau in the Black Forest region of Germany.

INSTAND e.V. has evolved since 1936, when the Haemometer Test Centre was founded by the German Society for Internal Medicine (DGIM) and the German Society for Haematology and Oncology (DGHO) in Jena to check the performance of devices measuring haemoglobin in whole blood (according SAHLI) and calibrate them. In 1966, a new name was given to a now multidisciplinary society – the Institute for Standardisation and Documentation in the Medical Laboratory, hence the abbreviation INSTAND, which has remained to the present day. The present name was accepted by the General Assembly at the AGM in November 2006 in Düsseldorf.

INSTAND e.V. is a non-profit, interdisciplinary scientific medical society with around 300 members. It is a member of national and international scientific bodies including: AWMF, DDG, NAMed, ICSH, CLSI (formerly NCCLS) and WASPaLM.

INSTAND e.V. is nominated as a Collaborating Centre for Quality Assurance and Standardisation in Laboratory Medicine of the World Health Organisation since 1994.

The goals of INSTAND e.V. can be summarised as follows:

The improvement of medical care of patients via improving laboratory diagnostic procedures and thus optimising supervision of therapy, aftercare and rehabilitation, as well as the early detection of diseases by improving diagnostic strategies and the choice of analytes and the use of methods with lower limits of detection.

Internal and external quality control have formed the backbone of activities of INSTAND e.V over several decades, although in recent years, the external quality assessment has played an ever increasing role as tools used for improving the reliability and comparability of results between laboratories and methods from different manufacturers. These processes are active at an international level and are reflected by the cooperation of INSTAND e.V. with national and international organisations dealing with standardisation such as DIN, ISO, CEN, JCTLM and IFCC as well as medical organisations such as the AWMF, Federal Medical Association, PTB and WASPaLM.

INSTAND e.V. organises national and international symposia and training courses as part of its programme as a WHO Collaborating Centre for Quality Assurance and Standardisation in Laboratory Medicine and in cooperation with the dvta and diw-mta e.V. (national organisations for technical assistants and continuous education).

INSTAND e.V. has carried out EQA-surveys in haematology since 1968 and in other fields of in-vitro diagnosis since 1970, so that at present over 200 programmes are on offer in all areas of laboratory diagnostic. The programme is divided into two parts – a mandatory part defined by the current Guideline of the German Federal Medical Association (Richtlinie der Bundesärztekammer [RiliBÄK]) and a larger, voluntary programme which has arisen due to the interest of participants.

INSTAND e.V. runs its own laboratories, which are mainly concerned in the development of reference measurement procedures using techniques such as AAS, GC-IDMS, CZE, HPLC-MS/MS and spectrophotometry. The laboratories have their own personnel and budget for equipment and reagents and provide the target values for EQA-materials used in surveys where the legal requirements (RiliBÄK) demand reference measurement values as target values in 28 analytes.

The full programme of EQA-surveys for 2007 can be seen in the programme listed on the website.

The structure of INSTAND e.V. is as follows:

The General Assembly

The Advisory Board (5 elected members plus 4 co-opted members) (see website for current members of the advisory board)

The Central Office in Düsseldorf

A selected group of reference measurement laboratories

A selected group of assigned-value laboratories

A group of EQA-managers and assistant EQA-managers

INSTAND e.V. has 22 full-time employees who are involved in the preparation for, organization and evaluation of EQA-surveys.