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External Quality Assessment schemes are a tool for clinical laboratories to evaluate and manage the quality of laboratory practice with the support of an independent party.

Just as last year, Julia Böck from the University of Würzburg presented a poster at ESLHO symposium which took place last month in Salamanca, Spain. Last year she won the Special Poster Prize awarded by ESLHO. The winner is chosen after they have the opportunity to present and discuss their work to the public during a prolonged poster session at lunchtime. “I was positively surprised to win the prize last year. During the session I already received a lot of positive feedback which also led to interesting discussions. This was very helpful. When you are working on such a study, ours was about NGS panels for T-Cell diagnosis, one looks at it in a certain way. Those new insights made us rethink the way we group the data. That was very helpful.
For me the major honour came from the fact that the winner was chosen by the public, which is very knowledgeable at the ESLHO Symposium. This made it extra special to me. Being part of EuroClonality has brought so many new insights. The group is relatively small and it feels very familiar. This makes meeting the people and talking about different issues really easy. For example, discussing the results of the EQA is especially interesting to me. I personally don’t do the testing so often, and these sessions make things much clearer to me. Every time I come I learn something new.”

The annual ESLHO week took place from 5 to 12 November. In the beautiful historic city of Salamanca, Spain, participants from all three ESLHO consortia, EuroFlow, EuroClonality and EuroMRD, came to the Hospedaria Fonseca to present and discuss the status and results of their joint scientific research and EQA programs. The highlight of the week was the 12th ESLHO Symposium titled 'New Developments in flow cytometry, immunogenetics and MRD assessment', with speakers from all over the world. During the day there was a special Poster Session where visitors could stay informed of the latest developments of the laboratories involved and the entrants could win the Special Poster Prize. This year's winner was Kerry Wall with her poster entitled: ‘Molecular residual disease analysis in a high throughput laboratory setting: Can automated DNA extraction of total white blood cells effectively substitute for DNA obtained via mononuclear cell separation?’

The 12th ESLHO Symposium will take place in Salamanca Spain on November 9th 2023. The Lectures all concern the subject: New developments in flow cytometry, immunogenetics and MRD assessment. This symposium is open to participants of the three consortia, EuroClonality, EuroMRD, and EuroFlow, only.

At the EHA2022 Congress, an EHA-IVDR session was held in which the local implementation of the IVDR was discussed. This resulted in a publication in HemaSphere with the title: “Experience With IVDR Implementation in Three Diagnostic Laboratories: Messages to EU Health Institutions, Diagnostic Healthcare Payers, and Authorities.” ESLHO, which is one of the Specialized Working Groups of the European Hematology Association (EHA), has contributed to both the 2022 EHA-IVDR session and this recent publication. The perspective summarizes the EHA-IVDR session, in which laboratory professionals from three different EU countries shared their experiences with local implementation of the IVDR. Messages to different stakeholders, aimed at supporting further IVDR implementation, are included at the end of the publication.