UK NEQAS Monthly Clinical Chemistry EQA Programme available
from April 2025 to UK Participants as well as to non-UK Participants
We are excited to offer UK Participants the opportunity to join our UK NEQAS Monthly Clinical Chemistry Scheme. It runs at half the frequency of our flagship UK NEQAS for Clinical Chemistry, but to all intents and purposes it runs in an identical fashion.
It has 11 Distributions of 3 Specimens per year, which is in line with all your other Laboratory-based Clinical Chemistry Schemes operated from Birmingham Quality (Thyroid, Steroid, HbA1c, Lipids etc etc).
There are subtle, nuanced, answers to all of this, but most Participants want a quick set of bullet points to allow them to consider if changing from fortnightly to monthly is for them.
As of the beginning of January 2025, all we want you to do is to be aware that belonging to a Monthly Clinical Chemistry scheme is now an option for you from 1st April 2025 onwards. We want you to start to have some discussions internally in your own Department/Network about whether you want to stay with the fortnightly UK NEQAS for Clinical Chemistry or consider moving to the UK NEQAS Monthly Clinical Chemistry Scheme. Are there some deal-breakers that you have to think about first?
The UK NEQAS Monthly Clinical Chemistry Scheme is ISO/IEC 17043:2023 Accredited and, for existing “BQ-NPEx” users only, it has automated transfer of results.
We had received an increasing number of requests over the last few years and the feedback from our Pan-Chemistry user Survey in the summer of 2024 was the clincher.
Many Participating Laboratories do not have the time/resources to properly deal with both the sample handling and the report findings that a fortnightly Scheme generates.
The reasons given were less financial rather than logistical.
We already had this service available to a tranche of non-UK Participants, but it is now available to all.
Yes. Given that it will be at half the frequency, it is bound to have slightly less ‘resolution’, but it will be as good as all our other monthly Schemes. A monthly frequency and the considered Scheme design and Reports formats and statistical handling we employ will still be ‘better’ – higher ‘resolution’ (in our view) than what you might get were you a Participant in an American or mainland-European Scheme.
At the Specimen-by-Specimen level, because we are sharing the same physical material across both the fortnightly Clinical Chemistry and the Monthly Clinical Chemistry Scheme, once the Monthly Clinical Chemistry Scheme Distribution closes, we are able to merge data to ensure Monthly Clinical Chemistry Scheme has sufficient numbers.
Once our Monthly Clinical Chemistry Scheme has a large enough user-base, both the fortnightly Clinical Chemistry and the Monthly Clinical Chemistry Schemes will stand on their own two feet, as it were. In the short term, by additionally utilising data from the fortnightly Clinical Chemistry, we will actually have more data points for Monthly Clinical Chemistry Scheme Participants. This won’t be how things run in the long-term but, at the moment, Monthly Clinical Chemistry Scheme users will get the benefit of the full 700 Participant sets of results.
You will make a small saving from using less reagents and a small saving from the lower price of the monthly service, but the big savings will be in freeing up your staff time for more value added activities.
This is a generic document going outside our Participant Firewall, so pricelists are a little sensitive. All the information will be available in time for your Annual Re-registration – see below.
From our point of view, there are all sorts of practical considerations that we need to take into account. Do we need to have contingencies in place to accommodate a new tranche of Participants who aren’t currently in our fortnightly Clinical Chemistry Scheme, but would be keen to be in our Monthly Clinical Chemistry Scheme? Do we need 2 litres or 1 litre of serum?
We need to make decisions much more in advance than we have been accustomed to doing. This means that you, as a Participant, need to have a good think, in good time, as to what your plans might be and then you should relay this back to us in good time, too.
As above, you need to decide if you want to make the change and when you want to make the change. You, as a Participant, need to have a good think, in good time, as to what your plans might be and then you should relay this back to us in good time, too. This is done through our on-line Re-registration.
We have taken the decision that for the UK NEQAS Monthly Clinical Chemistry Scheme we expect a 100% return rate. Though you will still be allowed to return results late and make amendments to results, these will now be classified as poor performance.
You can start on 1st April 2025. However, you need to have made your decision before completing your 2025 – 2026 on-line registration. All things being equal, this will open in late January and will close around 25th February 2025.
There won’t be the ability to ‘ping-pong’ between the two options. More information on the practicalities of registering for the UK NEQAS for Monthly Clinical Chemistry will depend on the finishing touches to our on-line re-registration pages.
No, certainly not. While we might gain some new, Participants for the UK NEQAS Monthly Clinical Chemistry Scheme, there was essentially a 50:50 split between support for the UK NEQAS for Clinical Chemistry and the Monthly Clinical Chemistry Scheme when we polled Participants in 2024. We will operate both while they remain vibrant and viable.
As for all our Schemes we allow registration throughout the year.
We have specific approaches to data processing for [1] any Analyte where there is only a small number of users or [2] for any Analyte where a method target would normally be used but for which your method does not have many users. If this affects you, please click the link to take you to our Participants’ Manual. The relevant section is Data Processing / Calculation of Target Values / No target value.
[ https://birminghamquality.org.uk/participants-manual/ ]
We have more information under the UK NEQAS Monthly Clinical Chemistry EQA Programme Page of our website. Please contact us if you still have any queries. If you are still confused after all of this, then a quick phone call might be better than a protracted email conversation.
Finlay MacKenzie
Director of Birmingham Quality, University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust
January 2025
