State and territorial public health laboratories: the collective experience.

Directors of State and Territorial Public-Health Laboratories have realized for many years that they needed to join together to compare and appraise their operations, identify common problems, and take steps leading to improvement of services provided. Before these objectives could be accomplished, a data base, built from contributions by all the laboratories, was necessary. This article is intended to give a general historical overview of the efforts at data collection and the establishment of a solid data base covering workload and activities of the laboratories which form the Association of State and Territorial Public Health Laboratories. The Consolidated Annual Report (CAR) on State and Territorial Public Health Laboratories--Fiscal Year 1973 is the 10th consecutive report of data concerning these laboratories. The annual issues of the CAR have served as a foundation from which additional documents covering position classification and pay, guide class job specifications, laboratory training activities, and relative values assigned to laboratory tests in measuring costs and workload have evolved over the past decade. Collectively, these documents provide the solid data base available today.