Results Submission

A: Submission deadlines are printed on your coversheet and announced in the trial issue email. Late or non-returns are recorded and may affect performance status.

A: No, trial distribution frequency is defined by UK NEQAS LI’s steering committee and specialist advisory group. It aims to provide a balance between ensuring comprehensive quality assessment of a laboratory’s testing, while not overloading their resources. UK NEQAS LI typically issue between 2-5 rounds per annum. Multiple trials are issued throughout the year to ensure that there are not long periods of time between a laboratory’s assay being assessed. This captures the laboratory’s test under different environmental conditions, using different reagent batches and different operators. Therefore, providing a more comprehensive picture of the quality of a laboratory’s assay. Furthermore, it allows us to send out EQA exercises capturing range of case scenarios, including different variant types/allelic loads, depending on the programme. More trials are issued in programmes where the risk associated with an incorrect test result are greater.

As persistent unsatisfactory performance requires unsatisfactory performance over multiple trial distributions and may suggest the presence of an ongoing systematic error affecting many patients, the trial distribution frequencies are designed to capture this information in <1 year.

If there are unforeseen and/or exceptional circumstances for a non-submission of results, please contact admin@ukneqasli.co.uk before trial closure to provide supporting information. Any active decision by a laboratory to only participate in a sub-set of trials for a given programme annually will not qualify for exclusion from scoring and performance monitoring (as applicable) in the absence of mitigating factors.