We had our CLIA inspection on Friday. Zero percent discrepancy.
I didn’t realize how much I’d been carrying until it was over. That kind of stress sits quietly in the background for weeks, and then one morning it’s just gone.
Now I’m waiting on the survey to finish. Hopefully that one comes back light too.
Here’s the part people outside the lab don’t see: you can’t prepare for an inspection the night before. You can’t even prepare in a month. What gets you to zero is a year of doing the small things right — the logs filled in when nobody’s checking, the temperatures recorded on time, the corrective action written up while the details are still fresh. By the time an inspector walks in, the work is already done or it isn’t.
That’s the real lesson. Preparation isn’t a project you start when the letter arrives. It has to be a habit, built into how the lab runs every ordinary day.
This inspection came earlier than we expected. They’re still catching up on the backlog from the COVID years, so the schedule has been uneven. The next one won’t be for about two years.
Two years sounds like a long time. It isn’t. It’s just the next stretch of ordinary days.