Laboratories : Case Study been at the forefront of quality assurance in pathology for the past 50 years , and UK NEQAS has been leading the way on external assessment .
The United Kingdom National External Quality Assessment Service ( UK NEQAS ) for Clinical Chemistry was established in 1969 at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham with a £ 500 grant from the then Ministry of Health . Since then the service has developed , under the aegis of the Department of Health ( DH ) initially and the UK NEQAS Consortium since the mid-1990s , and currently operates more than 30 programmes with 24 staff and a turnover of £ 2 million . It provides software and secure web services for seven other UK NEQAS centres , encompassing all clinical chemistry and microbiology investigations ( see article below ).
Birmingham Quality ( BQ ), a self-financing NHS unit operating on a non-profit basis within University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust , provides services on behalf of UK NEQAS . BQ also provides some services for point of care testing and the International EQAS for Clinical Chemistry as a WHO Collaborating Centre , encompassing all clinical chemistry and microbiology investigations . These activities require the production and distribution of over 325,000 specimens per year for more than 3,000 participants in the UK and overseas , including 85,000 reports and around 1.5 million individual test results .
BQ ’ s early growth was accommodated within the hospital , but continuing expansion led to a move to the Institute of Research and Development at Birmingham Research Park . BQ ’ s initial six units have now increased to 12 , with
The UK has been at the forefront of quality assurance in pathology for the past 50 years
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