Speakers
Rachel Marrington
Plenary
Patient-centric EQA using AKI as an example
Findings from the innovative AKI EQA were presented at the National AKI Summit in 2023 and formed part of both National recommendations to standardise acute kidney injury detection and alerting and the Acute Kidney Injury National Summit Report and Recommendations.
Clinicians are continually looking to utilise data from laboratories in different ways and the number of derived/algorithm tests available is increasing. Quality assurance of these processes is essential to ensure best use of resources and better patient outcomes. Use of patient based EQA is a simple way that this can be achieved in a number of clinical settings.
We have had positive engagement from many laboratories to this new approach of patient based EQA and several have reported to us how the Scheme identified errors in their LIMS algorithm which had negatively impacted patient care, and which has now been rectified.
Finlay MacKenzie is the Director and Lead Scientist of Birmingham Quality, which is the largest UK NEQAS Centre for Clinical Chemistry operating over 50 Schemes with hundreds of participating laboratories.
He is an NHS Consultant Clinical Scientist and is Organiser of many EQA Schemes in Clinical Chemistry, but is perhaps most well-known for the UK NEQAS for Thyroid Hormones. His biggest interest is in trying to demystify some of the statistics that haunt the EQA arena and has been instrumental in using graphical output to explain laboratory and method performance in regular reports and commentaries. The SAUSAGE(S) initiative for eGFR was a case in point which impacted all UK laboratories. Combining analytical method performance and individual Laboratory interpretations in the Rainbow Trout plot is now the go-to graph for this type of data.
He has contributed to several international IFCC Committees as well as serving on the UK NEQAS Board of Trustees.
