The Calculating Quality Reporting Service (CQRS) is an approvals, reporting and payments calculation system designed for GP practices. The system is operated on behalf of NHS England (NHSE) by the commissioning support unit (CSU) collaborative. It provides the means for general practices and primary care networks (PCN) to track, monitor and declare achievement of the services delivered by primary care.
There are two separate systems:
- a national service (CQRS national)
- a local service (CQRS local)
You can find out more about these systems, what they are used for and how they work at: About CQRS – CSU Collaborative
CQRS national
For CQRS national, NHS England and the English General Practitioners Committee (GPC England) of the British Medical Association (BMA) consult on the GP contract on an annual basis. Following these consultations, the final service information is made available on the CQRS system and offered out to general practices to accept, where this option is available. Enhanced services (nationally agreed voluntary service programmes) which practices can choose to sign up to and deliver are also included.
Some services are automatically accepted on behalf of a service provider where their agreement is subject to membership of another organisation (for example, some PCN services).
CQRS local
CQRS local has been developed by the commissioning support units (CSU) collaborative as a claim management system to support the introduction of local schemes between NHS commissioners and primary care providers. It is set up for local enhanced services (LES) and local incentive schemes (LIS). Access to CQRS local is via a username and password.
Data is submitted in the same way as manual CQRS national claims and is not automatically extracted from the clinical system.
Evidence of achievement can be uploaded to support claims and progress of the claim can be tracked via the system.
Data collection in CQRS
The General practice extraction service (GPES) is a data extraction system which works with CQRS and the GP IT clinical systems suppliers as part of the general practice collection service.
GPES collects information for a wide range of purposes, including providing general practice data used to calculate payments.
NHSE collects data from general practices which are participating to each established national data collection; this happens by receiving data from the GP IT clinical systems suppliers via the GPES data extraction system.
For information required to produce payments for GP practices, data is sent by NHSE to CQRS national to perform the appropriate payment calculations. Data not available for collection by GPES are entered manually into the CQRS by each general practice.
Information collected by NHSE via GPES is also used to track and manage general practice performance against various targets and enhanced services specifications set out by NHSE.
NHSE has a duty to publish aggregate information that has been collected, this is done via the NHSE website.
The list of all active GPES data collections and related publications can be found at this link: GPES extracts and benefits – NHS England Digital
Services managed within CQRS national
Services which generate a payment and those which do not generate a payment vary from year to year. Further information is available on the CQRS website.
Access to CQRS
Sign-in to the CQRS login page is facilitated using an individual’s NHS mail account or via a system-specific username and password login.
Organisations will have self-managed, role-based, access to CQRS via an assigned administrator who will be able to authorise the accounts of other users in their organisation.
Access levels can be set by the local administrator. See CQRS user guides for more information on how to set up user profiles.
Training and support
Training materials and user guides can be accessed as an online training resource. Users do not need a login to access the training portal, CQRS training.
User support is available through a central service desk providing support to both CQRS local and CQRS national:
- support@cqrs.co.uk
- phone 0330 124 4039
Related GPG content
Other helpful resources
- NHS Digital, National diabetes audit dashboard hub
- National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, Clinical guidelines and quality standards
- NHS Digital, General practice data collections
- NHS England, Standardised appointment categories