Quality initiative for BreastScreen Aotearoa

The initiative is similar to successful quality assurance programmes in Australia and the United Kingdom, to maximise benefits and minimise harms across organised breast screening programmes.

The RQAP is a group of four BSA Clinical Directors, chaired by Dr Marli Gregory, BSA's Clinical Leader.

The Panel acts on behalf of the National Screening Unit to ensure high quality radiologist reading. The members review each radiologist's data and generate feedback to the relevant Clinical Director.  This helps to maintain consistency across the programme and provides a national overview of performance.

This feedback, provided every six months, shows the data of an individual radiologist’s (de-identified) outcomes for a number of standard targets, including:

• recall rate
• positive predictive value
• specificity
• cancer detection rates.

Individual radiologists are also able to see their outcomes on a graph with all other BSA radiologists’ outcomes for individual targets.