African Strategies For Advancing Pathology | African Strategies For Advancing Pathology Main menu Pathology plays a critical role in guiding clinical decisions about patient diagnosis and treatment. It also is an essential tool in screening and disease prevention programs that contributes to the overall health and well being of communities. Inadequate pathology services result in ineffective treatment programs due to delayed or inaccurate diagnoses which affect patient care directly and lead to erroneous estimates of disease rates. The latter results in a compromised ability for health care systems to plan for resource allocation which in turn results in poorer clinical outcomes.