Weekly rescreening of 10% of the total cervical Papanicolaou smears: a worthwhile quality assurance scheme.

BACKGROUND

In awareness of possible false negative cervical Papanicolaou tests in routine service, the authors developed and tested a new scheme that would be a practical adjunct in quality assurance.

OBJECTIVE

To evaluate the value of a weekly rescreen of 10% of the total cervical Papanicolaou smears as a quality assurance scheme.

DESIGN

A prospective descriptive study.

RESULTS

Of 31,914 slides in the 9-month study period, a total of 3,097 slides (9.7%) were picked up in the rescreen scheme. There were 29 discordant cases (0.9%) consisting of 7 cases (0.2%) of errors from the initial reporting, 2 cases of errors from the rescreening and 20 other cases from disagreements on designating atypical squamous cells of undetermined significance. The errors of the initial reports could be further classified into 6 cases due to screening errors and one case because of interpretation error. The proper diagnoses had been revised and resent to the attending gynecologists.

CONCLUSION

A weekly rescreening 10% of total cervical Papanicolaou smears scheme was worthwhile for quality assurance. It could be used for evaluating screener performance and create internal quality improvement. The detected false diagnoses were manageable.