Doha, 01 December 2021: Women’s Wellness and Research Center’s Department of Reproductive Health (DORM) laboratory has been awarded an ISO certification by UK-based Intertek Certification Limited for its high-quality ethical standard of providing infertility and IVF (invitro fertilization) services to couples in Qatar.
Intertek is the world’s first industry-agnostic, end-to-end health, safety and wellbeing assurance program for people, workplaces and public spaces, offering audits, training, inspection, verification and certification solutions. The process of supervision and training for WWRC’s DORM lab certification took approximately four months starting from June to September 2021.
The certification demonstrates high quality and safety measures that the laboratory undertakes while importing embryos from other labs abroad. The department serves patients who have reproductive problems or difficulties or delays in having kids. The lab currently conducts between 1,300 to 1,500 IVF cycles with up to 11,000 clinic appointments, comprising new referrals and follow-ups, per year.
Commenting about the certification, WWRC acting Chief Executive Officer and Medical Director, Dr. Hilal Al Rifai says: “Intertek provides safety and performance certification services to nationally recognized standards for a wide range of products. We are very proud of the achievement of DORM by receiving the ISO certification through Intertek for its IVF laboratory. This shows that we are on par with international standards and this helps to harmonize technical specifications of all our IVF lab services making patient care more efficient. Conformity to international standards helps reassure patients that services offered are safe, efficient and of good standard.”
He explains further that international standards are strategic tools and guidelines to help IVF labs tackle some of the most demanding challenges of modern services. “Maintaining these standards ensure that our operations are as efficient as possible and can safely increase productivity as well as quality of patient care. We are very happy that our DORM’s laboratory has been awarded the ISO certification because of its high ethical standards,” Dr. Al Rifai adds.
According to Dr Alia A Al-Hadi, Chair of Reproductive Medicine, HMC, the benefits of the ISO certification are to enhance patient satisfaction; maximize the standardization of work performance and minimizing the inconsistency; monitoring quality of materials used for patient care; objective setting to improve from the current level of performance; and internal audits to verify compliance in addition to improving the lab’s KPIs (key performance indicators).
“The International Standard Organization (ISO) is the most recognized standard for quality and safety. ISO governs thousands of standards and these standards can be applied to healthcare industry and IVF in particular. So, specifically for our IVF laboratory, being ISO certified gives international credibility to the lab. It makes it easier for us to deal with other labs in Europe and United States, especially in exchange of staff or educational materials,” she explains.
Dr. Al-Hadi states that DORM provides all services ranging from treating sub-fertile couples with simple stimulation to intra-uterine insemination till the completion of IVF cycle with or without intracytoplasmic sperm injection(ICSI) where the sperm is injected inside the egg using high profile lab equipment.
“We have a dedicated andrology team to manage male patients with sub fertility and for performing surgical male procedures. In addition, we have a fertility preservation service currently dedicated for cancer patients to freeze their gametes or embryos to be used after their cure from cancer. We perform a pre-genetic diagnosis on embryos dedicated mainly for couples with genetic diseases to be able to have a child free of any inherited disease,” she adds.
