Delhi State AIDS Control Society 
External Quality Assurance Scheme
External Quality Assurance Scheme: Testing of blood sample is the commonest way to know one’s HIV status. Knowing HIV status a HIV non reactive person can zealously protect him/ herself from HIV infection through out life and HIV reactive person can lead a positive life with services like psychosocial support, provision of ART, community care home treatment of opportunistic infection etc. Thus HIV testing occupies very large portion of the entire HIV/ AIDS prevention & control programme. Not only HIV test but accurate HIV test is the vital. False HIV reactive report can lead negative consequences in the life of an individual for eg. social discrimination , denial of access to basic requirement of life, psychosocial stress even to the extent of suicide. On the other side false HIV non reactive result can spread the infection faster. Accuracy of HIV testing does not depend upon on single individual or one factor. A team of individual is responsible for it. The team comprises kit manufacturer, sample collector, laboratory technician, DEO, counselor . To maintain a high quality of HIV testing EQAS has been started. All the Medical officer and technician from all functioning blood bank and VCTC have been trained under this scheme. The training is conducted in collaboration with National institute of Communicable Diseases. NICD is the National Reference laboratory for this purpose. Delhi is implementing the EQAS phase I. Under phase II the six State reference Laboratory will be empowered to take up the training of the VCTC & Blood bank. The presently role taken up by NICD will be distributed to all the six SRLs functioning in Delhi. IT has also been proposed that the private laboratory conducting HIV test are to be covered by this scheme. This way the private laboratory will follow the national guidelines for HIV testing & all the testing conducted in Delhi will be uniform.