Dear colleagues
I have been delighted by this thread, and the multiple equations thown about
around the concept of measurement uncertainty. But I am a very old lion
(retiring in 2 months) and if you will excuse me, I think you are all
missing the essential point. In a clinical laboratory setting, the most
important thing is what a clinician does with our results in the context of
a patient. At a simplistic level, this may mean that a change in results is
judged as 'doing better' or 'doing worse' irrespective of whether such
change is statistically or clinically or physiologically significant At a
much more fundamental level, our results are usually judged against
so-called reference ranges, and major decisions are made against this
irrespective of how or when the reference ranges were derived, what assay
system was used to derive them, and what validity they have compared with
current assay systems, and usually forgetting that reference ranges are
based upon average values which by definition are not applicable to an
individual patient.
I am aware of so many cases of clinical misinterpretation which are (if you
metrologists will forgive me for saying so) far more important for patients
than arithmetical or semantic jargon about measurement uncertainty
with best wishes to all
Gordon Challand
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