286 Forensic Laboratory Management: Applying Business Principles
quality: is word is something like “art” (hard to dene, but recognized
when it is there). ISO has a complicated denition, but for the foren-
sic laboratory think of quality as “reliability” or “accuracy.”
quality control (QC): All of the technical, bench-level things a competent
analyst/examiner does to make sure that the test results she obtains
are reliable. ese things would certainly include the routine use of
control materials, charting the control results, doing the stats on
them, and interpreting trends in the data. But the idea can be wid-
ened to include calibration checks on balances, for example, checks
of wavelength calibration in spectrophotometers, monitoring vol ...