Internal quality control and control charting

Analysts and quality staff who already run controls and want the data to tell them something, and technical managers who review QC across several methods.

Some arithmetic is involved and it is all built up in the room. Delegates work on charts from real control data during the day.

The syllabus below is the standard shape of the course. It is adjusted to the matrices, methods and instruments you actually run, which is agreed before delivery rather than discovered on the day.

• Chart types

  Shewhart individuals, mean and range charts, and choosing between them

• Establishing limits

  Warning and action limits from your own data, not from the specification

• Trend rules

  Runs, drifts, shifts and the rule sets that detect them

• Out of control

  Distinguishing a genuine shift from an ordinary outlier

• Re-baselining

  When limits should be recalculated and when doing so hides a problem

• Review

  Making QC review a short routine task rather than a monthly project

Courses are written around what a delegate can do afterwards, not what was presented to them. These are the outcomes this one is built to produce.

1. 01Build a control chart from your own data and set defensible limits on it.
2. 02Read a chart and say whether the method is stable, drifting or shifted.
3. 03Apply a trend rule set consistently instead of judging charts by eye.
4. 04Decide when re-baselining is legitimate and when it is concealment.

Control limits set from the product specification instead of from method performance is the single most common charting error, and it makes the chart useless in both directions: it stays silent while the method degrades, then alarms on results that were never a problem.

A chart nobody reads is a filing exercise. A chart read weekly for two minutes is the cheapest early warning a laboratory can own.

Delivered over 1 day, at your site or at the laboratory, in English or Arabic. Sessions are built around real records, real data and real failures rather than slides of clause numbers, and the people delivering them spend the rest of the week doing the thing being taught.

Group size is agreed in advance — practical sessions are capped so that everyone works rather than watches. An attendance certificate is issued to each delegate on completion.

Ask about any subject not listed here. If it is not something we teach well, we will say so rather than build it for the sake of the booking.