India’s medical diagnostic industry appears to be facing a trust deficit with a nationwide survey indicating that one in three consumers claimed to have had received wrong results or had lost faith in labs.

The survey by Local Circles, a non-government community social network, has found that 28 per cent of a sample of 8,355 consumers had “low level of trust” and seven per cent had “very low or no trust” in diagnostic laboratories.

Another 48 per cent of these respondents said they trusted their laboratories but remain vigilant about the results.

The survey was based on online responses received from around 22,000 consumers in 215 districts across India, each sent a set of questions. Not all respondents answered all the questions.

One in three (33 per cent) among a set of 8,333 respondents had been instructed by their doctors to use a specific diagnostic laboratory for tests. However, 29 per cent of this set of consumers had received no such instructions.

Among the respondents who had visited diagnostic laboratories for tests, 30 per cent claimed the results they had received over the past three years had been wrong up to three times.

At least 34 per cent of 8,089 respondents claimed they had received one or more wrong test results over the past three years. But another 34 per cent of these respondents said they had never received wrong test results.

“The survey underscores poor trust levels among consumers and the need for government intervention to improve laboratory standards,” said Akshay Gupta, general manager of Local Circles, a network that he says is intended to generate information to guide policy-making.

The Clinical Establishment Act passed by Parliament in 2010 requires all clinical establishments, including medical diagnostic laboratories, to adhere to certain minimum infrastructure and quality standards, but remains unimplemented, Gupta said. “States need to implement the act to ensure standards in all laboratories,” he said.

The National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL), a government agency that gives accreditation — or stamps of quality — to laboratories had pointed out in September 2019 that only around a thousand out of an estimated 100,000 medical laboratories are accredited by the NABL.

Among the 100,000 laboratories, around two per cent are large labs, 18 per cent are medium-sized, and the rest are small labs.

“Accreditation requirements include equipment and human resources and can be challenging for small labs,” said Girdhar Gyani, director-general of the Association of Healthcare Providers of India, a body of large hospitals. Gyani had earlier spent five years in training accreditation assessors.