Assessment of technologist workload as a factor in quality of laboratory performance.

A very significant effort in terms of dollars and man hours (up to 40% of workload) is spent on providing effective quality control in the chemistry laboratory. An important factor in quality of performance which is intuitively obvious but not readily quantitated is technologist workload. We have been able to significantly correlate (P less than 0.01) over a period of 4 years, performance in an external proficiency survey with technologist workload. Not surprisingly, the data suggests that the quality of test results diminishes as workload increases. The management strategy should then be directed towards decreasing workload possibly through appropriate automation.