Troubleshooting, Support and Education

Support is available to all participants, including those with performance issues in either a single survey or persistently outwith consensus (POC). Advice, further data analysis and repeat specimens are provided on request. Downloadable documents offering advice on performance and an audit template for POC investigations is available by logging in to the participant-specific section of the website.

An effective External Quality Assessment programme should not be regarded as merely a means to assess laboratory performance, but should also seek to support and educate participants to enable them to improve and optimise patient care. UK NEQAS (Blood Coagulation) is committed to provide support to participants in all aspects of haemostasis testing. This includes:

• Advice from internationally renowned experts in the field of haemostasis.
• Repeat samples to investigate test performance issues.
• Additional data analysis to investigate possible causes of outwith consensus performance.
• Documents advising on how to approach assay performance issues, and audit templates to record root cause analysis. These can be downloaded from the participant-specific section of the website.

In addition, supplementary exercises are carried out to investigate topical areas of interest, and questionnaires are distributed to survey current practice and inform participants of the approach to investigations employed by their peers.