Implementation of a method for glucose measurements in community pharmacies

Objectives We aimed to implement a method for glucose measurements that could be used as a comparison method for asessing patients' self‐monitoring of blood glucose. Further, we investigated whether pharmacies could achieve an analytical quality comparable to glucose measurements performed in general practice. Methods Sixteen Norwegian pharmacy employees were trained in glucose measurement, quality control and blood sampling. The comparison method, HemoCue Glucose 201⁺, was validated in four steps: (1) estimation of the variation between the HemoCue instruments to be used at the 16 pharmacies, (2) comparison between HemoCue results and a laboratory glucose method, (3) monitoring quality by internal quality controls and (4) an external quality‐assessment scheme. The pharmacies' results of the external quality assessment were compared to those of 359 general practices. Key findings The coefficient of variation for HemoCue instruments was 6.1% at the low level and 1.7% at the normal and high levels. Bias was negligible at the normal level. The coefficients of variation for internal quality controls were 4.5, 1.5 and 1.2% for the low, normal and high levels, respectively. All pharmacies achieved good precision and acceptable or good trueness in the external quality assessment. The pharmacies exhibited significantly lower variation between sites (2.2 and 1.2%) than general practices (3.8 and 2.9%) on both external quality‐assessment samples. Conclusions Given correct training and the establishment of a system of quality assurance, pharmacies are capable of obtaining glucose measurements that can be used as comparison measurements for controlling patients' meters. The pharmacies had external quality‐assessment results comparable to general practice.