That's a very good point lucylou,I personally get a lot of satisfaction just looking at the nice colourful graphs! But seriously, at the moment we just review some of the reports of a particular trend to see if there are patterns. Recently, some of our process failures indicated that patient demographic errors were repeat events, and when we looked at each of these a bit more there was a theme of either clinicians incorrectly identifying the correct number of digits in the hospital record number when completing forms and labelling samples,or the lab entering these onto the LIMS incorrectly We have subsequently re-designed our blood request forms to make it easier for everyone to identify whether the number used is a local hospital number or a new NHS number (different number of digits) by just sequencing the boxes on the form in groups of 3 with a final single box for the 10 digit NHS number being more widely used in the UK. I suppose we should write a summary to explain tends for each category - which should reduce if the corrective actions were effective. There obviously has to be a risk based approach to doing this due to time constraints. I would find it very helpful to know how other handle their trending data too.