POLQM’s 2024 Laboratory Quality Management (LQM) and Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (AST) courses have officially begun! We are pleased to announce that we have record high attendance this year, and hope all our participants will learn from and enjoy these courses.
If you were hoping to join either course, unfortunately registration is now closed. We expect to open registration for 2025 this coming October, and will announce updates in our newsletter.
The Laboratory Quality Management course is intended for anyone who works with or in a clinical or research laboratory and handles quality management issues. While the course addresses a need for Laboratory Quality Managers (laid out in ISO15189:2022 ‘Medical Laboratories – Particular Requirements for Quality and Competence’), the course is generally applicable to technologists, physicians, administrators, and other laboratory professionals. The course runs for 22 weeks, is fully online, and has been accredited by the University of British Columbia’s Continuing Professional Development program, as well as the Canadian Society for Medical Laboratory Science, the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada Continuing Education (MOC), and the American Society for Clinical Pathology. Participants completing the course will receive a certificate enabling them to receive continuing education credits from those organizations. The course has attracted students from all over the world including Botswana, Cambodia, China, England, Egypt, France, India, Lebanon, Mongolia, Oman, Saudi Aradia, St. Maarten, the United States of America, and – of course – Canada.
Although completely online, the course features online discussions and assignments that foster communication between participants.
More information on the LQM course is available here: https://polqm.med.ubc.ca/course-description/
The Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing and Interpretation course covers collecting, testing, identifying, and reporting antimicrobial susceptibility. Topics covered include understanding breakpoints, interpretive categories, and international standards and guidelines, biological mechanisms of action in antimicrobial susceptibility, selection of effective antimicrobials based on laboratory information, and much more. The course lasts 12 weeks, and is intended for those with a foundational knowledge of microbiology. Course videos are released weekly, and include prompts for online discussions with faculty leads and subject matter experts that prompt discussion with experts and classmates. The course is designed to accommodate students in any time zone, and is eligible for UBC CPD and CSMLS credits.
More information is available here: https://polqm.med.ubc.ca/ast/
