QS138 Quality Insights Audit Tool
A quality improvement benchmarking audit tool for hospitals to regularly self-assess their compliance to elements of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) QS138 Blood Transfusion Quality Standard
Registration is open in England and Wales
Northern Ireland will follow
Sign up to begin your journey to enhance patient care
QS138 Quality Insights is a free online platform for data entry. It automatically analyses data and generates instant bespoke trending reports for hospitals, with regional and national benchmarking data, without the need for time-consuming, manual data analysis.
How do we register?
Agree a Transfusion Practitioner (TP), or equivalent, to manage an account. Access is available to NHS and private hospitals. Accounts are set up per hospital site (not Trust / Health Board) to an assigned individual with a maximum one registration per hospital.
If you work in a team of TPs and / or cover multiple sites you can either set up one dedicated TP contact for all sites, or have a dedicated person per hospital. You cannot use a Team email to register.
Email niceqs138@nhsbt.nhs.uk
Provide the name of the hospital you want to sign up and which Regional Transfusion Committee your hospital belongs to.
User agreement
You will be sent a user agreement; accept this to progress.
We give access
Once accepted, we will grant access and send you the information you need to set up your Snap© account and start using QS138 Quality Insights.
The difference between this audit tool and the National Comparative Audit (NCA) audit of NICE QS138
How QS138 Quality Insights is used will be determined locally by hospital transfusion teams. Less structured than the NCA, QS138 Quality Insights allows the flexibility to audit individual or all the quality statements up to four times per year, providing instant access to results with easily accessible automated benchmarking audit reports. The NCA audit provides a snapshot; results are shared with hospital teams once all the results have been returned and analysed.
Both complement each other; this tool can be used locally between national audits to focus in on improvement areas and monitor the effectiveness of any interventions.
If you already have hospital data from a NCA QS138 audit you can resuse it by submitting it on QS138 Quality Insights, helping inform the next quality improvement project decision.
Background to NICE QS138
In 2016 NICE published QS138, associated with the NICE guideline for Blood transfusion NG24, which highlights four priority areas for improvement:
- iron supplementation
- tranexamic acid for adults
- reassessment after red blood cell transfusion
- patient information
NICE guidance (including quality standards) ensures the promotion of good health and good care for people who use services and are in line with the best available evidence of clinical effectiveness and cost effectiveness.
Hospitals are expected to make efforts towards ensuring that clinical practice follows NICE guidance and quality standards, whilst this is not a statutory requirement, compliance may be assessed by the regulator and / or commissioners.
Background to QS138 Quality Insights
QS138 Quality Insights has been developed by the NHS Blood and Transplant Patient Blood Management team with funding from the National Blood Transfusion Committee.
It builds on earlier work by the team and the former South East Coast RTC TP group, who together developed an audit tool (endorsed by NICE) which provided the foundations for the automated version.
Providing hospitals with the opportunity to focus on improvement areas
A guide for hospitals
Comprehensive information is available in a user guide
Recognitions
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence
Listed QS138 Quality Insights as an Endorsed Resource for Quality Standard QS138 in May 2023.
SHOT
Referenced in the Key Recommendations section to support Appropriate management of anaemia and making safe transfusion decisions.
Transfusion 2024
A Five-year Plan for Clinical and Laboratory Transfusion Practice
Listed as a resource to support the implementation of Patient Blood Management Action A1: develop a transfusion practice self-assessment tool to allow benchmarking.
We'd love to hear from you
If your hospital or region have signed up, please share with us how you are using QS138 Quality Insights to evidence your practice and plan your improvement areas to enhance patient care