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Quality Assurance/Quality Control Project Many people may have heard or used the term quality assurance/quality control, or QA/QC, but don't know what it actually means. Here is an attempt to explain how attention to QA/QC improves the quality of information used for decision-making.
Quality assurance (QA) is defined by the USEPA as: "an integrated system of management activities involving planning, implementation, assessment, reporting and quality improvement to ensure that a process, item or service is of the type and quality needed and the client expects." This definition is designed to be flexible and useful to groups with varied quality assurance needs, but may not be very useful to anyone who is not involved with QA on a daily basis. A more user-friendly definition might be: a written plan that documents the journey of a sample, or a piece of information, from planning, through data collection and processing and final approval. In other words, QA is a written plan that can be shared with someone who is not familiar with a process, which outlines the steps taken to ensure that data are of a predetermined quality.
The quality assurance part of QA/QC is designed to make you and other users feel confident that there is a paper trail that can be used at any time to determine whether there is a problem with the process. QA is thought by many to be a very complicated endeavor that requires an enormous amount of time and paper work, but most people engage in QA without treating it in a formal way. Often the only thing that stands between a daily routine and a formal QA plan is a pen.
We often associate QA with the work of analytical laboratories, but QA/QC is an important concept for a variety of purposes such as handling permit applications, generating fiscal documents or sharing compliance and enforcement information. For example, groups that are responsible for controlling documents submitted with permit applications need a quality assurance management plan to ensure that applications are processed in a consistent manner. A written manual that identifies which documents or forms are required to be submitted under which regulations and how and where the documents are filed, provides consistency among individuals within the program or bureau specific mandates.
Quality Control (QC) is defined by USEPA as "the overall system of technical activities that measures the attributes and performance of a process, item or service against defined standards to verify that they meet the stated requirements established by the customer." The emphasis is on technical activities. In the case of analytical laboratories, QC involves comparing the empirical evidence that was promised in the quality assurance section to predetermined acceptance criteria. For example, do recoveries of surrogate compounds meet the criteria that were promised in the QA component? An example of a non-laboratory QC application is auditing ten percent of the forms entered by DEP staff for completeness and accuracy. In cases where data submitted to DEP as part of a permit application are taken at face value, this would be stated in the QA section and the QC section for this particular element would not be applicable.
The practice of QA/QC improves confidence in the data generated and used by the Department, improves credibility with parties interested in data and improves the efficiency of all staff. With education, training and a few changes in the way individuals think about QA and QC, significant improvements can be made in the quality of the information used for decision-making at DEP.
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from the commissioner
