NPAAC documents outline that participation in EQA is a requirement for accreditation. In setting benchmarks across all RCPA QAP programs, nonparticipation in one survey has been consistently set as a criterion. Survey frequency, however, is higher in Chemical Pathology QAP, than in other programs. The number of letters and workload that would be generated for Chemical Pathology staff and NATA taking this approach would be untenable and therefore, the previous benchmarks were considered by the committee and may be further refined in the future.
The KPI reports are generated in February and August and are based on the End‐of‐cycle reports from the previous six months. It needs to be considered if this is an early enough warning for a laboratory. Participation Indicators could be reviewed more immediately than 6 months, however, software development is a significant barrier required to achieve this. When reviewing the frequency of KPI reports against the Framework, NATA would only be notified of persisting suboptimal performance after one year at the earliest. In addition, laboratories submitting no results for a Cycle will not generate an End‐of‐cycle report and therefore, under the current system will not be identified as a laboratory with nonparticipation in EQA.
Document download
This publication is available as a downloadable document.
The Role of External Quality Assurance in Identifying Poor Laboratory Performance(PDF 518 KB)