Within the framework of the Wet op het Bevolkingsonderzoek (WBO; Law on Population Screening) the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport has supplied official licences to eight regional centres for prenatal screening. The National Institute for Public Health and the Environment / Centre for Population Screening will coordinate prenatal screening at the national level. The regional centres are responsible for carrying out the prenatal screening within the own region, for the quality of the screening procedure and for the supply of data to the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment. The QSPS by BMA – the Quality System Prenatal Screening – supports all aspects of this prenatal screening procedure.
How does it work?
The QSPS by BMA allows each healthcare professional involved in the prenatal screening process to enter the essential data relating to his or her contribution to the process online into the programme. This enables users to combine the outcome of the first counseling, the combined test, the structural ultrasound examination, the possible subsequent examinations and, ultimately, of the pregnancy itself, thus allowing one to assess the quality of the entire chain. One unique aspect of the QSPS by BMA is the possibility for pregnant women to enter their own data after the delivery through the internet, e.g. on the outcome of the pregnancy or the baby’s health, thus enriching the QSPS database with vital information.
The QSPS functions as a mutual quality mirror for all contracting parties working for the eight regional centres for prenatal screening: individual practitioners, medical practices and ultrasound centres. Unwilling to await further national developments, various regions in the Netherlands have decided to acquire and use the QSPS. By BMA. Why? Because a quality system is required right at this moment, not tomorrow:
- Fully web-based, available 24/7
- Complies with the minimal dataset and is prepared for the Netherlands IGZ registration (Netherlands Health Care Inspectorate)
- Supports the workflow
- Low threshold and user-friendly
- Check on completeness
- Quality assessment and comparison through online reports and analysis
- Authorisation and logging
- Generates annual reports and statistical analyses for guaranteed quality per centre, region or nationwide
- Rich database for future research
QSPS, the regional variant
Prenatal screening in the Netherlands is supervised by eight regional centres. However, each region naturally has its own working procedures based on decades of experience. That is why BMA also developed a regional variant of the QSPS. Originally, this was done on behalf of the MUMC, the Maastricht academic hospital. The regional QSPS variant contains additional functionalities fully complying with MUMC working processes. In the region Southeast Netherlands, for instance, there was a need for an extended monitoring process in connection with the application for an NT screening and its outcome. New is also that the lab will instantly see that a blood sample has been sent that requires immediate testing. At present, the MUMC and BMA are working on a link between the PerkinElmer LifeCycle algorithms (the algorithms used to determine the chance of a Down Syndrome) and the regional QSPS by BMA.
