Integrated Public Health Laboratory (IPHL)
Integrated Public Health Laboratory (IPHL)
India is increasingly facing a high burden of emerging infectious diseases along with substantially enhanced prevalence of non-communicable diseases. Mortality and disability caused by communicable diseases and other emerging infections (e.g. COVID-19) is significantly impacting human life and economic growth of the country. The country needs to devise effective healthcare solutions that not only boost control of existing diseases like HIV, TB, and Malaria, but also prepared to effectively detect, prevent, control, and manage emerging infectious diseases and threats to human health. This calls for identifying cost-effective and efficient healthcare diagnosis and delivery mechanisms. One of the critical interventions is to establish cost-effective laboratory systems that provide rapid, reliable, and accurate test results for optimal impact on patient care and overall health outcomes. This includes establishing a network of integrated public health laboratories at various levels of health care for providing diagnostics for disease-specific programmes and for integrating healthcare surveillance supported by quality assured laboratory data. The epicentre of such laboratories will be the district with defined upwards and downwards linkages. This guideline focuses on establishing Integrated Public Health Laboratories at District Hospitals. The term Integrated Public Health Laboratory (IPHL) extends to a laboratory providing comprehensive lab services including infectious disease diagnostics along with other diagnostic services such as Haematology, Clinical Biochemistry, Microbiology, Virology and Pathology, all combined under one umbrella. Development of IPHL will involve physical, functional and data integration of different sections of the district hospital laboratories. The physical integration will include establishment of a central sample collection facility in a patient-friendly location. The functional integration will require various vertical program sections to operate as the coordinated limbs of a single body i.e. the district public health laboratory, in the process sharing space, manpower and equipment and thus, avoiding duplication and disconnect. The data integration will be through an integrated Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) to monitor the data flow under various programs, facilities, departments to feed in to the IHIP platform for coordinated public health action.