Maternity Services dashboard

Better Births (2016), the report of the National Maternity Review, recommended that a nationally agreed set of indicators should be developed to help local maternity systems track, benchmark and improve the quality of maternity services. In response, NHS England and NHS Improvement, in partnership with NHS Digital, have produced a National Maternity Services Dashboard for maternity services to use.

The dashboard enables clinical teams in maternity services to compare their performance with their peers on a series of Clinical Quality Improvement Metrics (CQIMs) and National Maternity Indicators (NMIs), for the purposes of identifying areas that may require local clinical quality improvement. 

The CQIMs are sourced from the Maternity Services Dataset (MSDS) and are published on a monthly basis. NMIs are annually published indicators drawn from external data sources such as the National Maternity and Perinatal Audit, MBRRACE-UK, CQC Maternity Survey, NHS Staff Survey and the GMC Survey. These indicators have been selected to provide a holistic picture of the performance of maternity services and cover five different domains including mortality and morbidity, choice and continuity of carer, clinical care and health promotion, organisational culture and user experience.

The dashboard also shows descriptive statistics and demographic data (sourced from MSDS), which provides a profile of the maternity population and activity within a given provider. This includes data on, for example, number of bookings, deliveries and births, maternal age, BMI and ethnicity.

Please be aware that the dashboard includes historic CQIM data that are yet to be published in the Maternity Services Monthly Statistics publication pages. Statistics for these CQIMs will be finalised once these publications have been updated.

The Maternity Services Data Set (MSDS) is an administrative dataset used by providers of maternity care in England for clinical purposes. It is submitted to, analysed and published by NHS Digital on a monthly basis, in order to build a national picture of maternity services activity in that month.

Mothers and Babies: Reducing Risk through Audits and Confidential Enquiries across the UK (MBRRACE-UK) is a national programme. Its mission is to conduct methodologically rigorous research to provide evidence to improve the care provided to women, babies and families during pregnancy, childbirth, the newborn period and early childhood as well as promoting the effective use of resources by perinatal health services. The collection is commissioned by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP).

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) Maternity Services Survey is carried out every 2 years (annually from 2019), and asks women a range of questions about their experience of choice and continuity of care in maternity services in hospital. The data is used to inform the CQC’s ratings published for trusts and to provide CQC inspectors information on areas of risk which may need attention.

The National Maternity and Perinatal Audit (NMPA) is an annual audit of the NHS maternity services across England, Scotland and Wales published by the Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists (RCOG). The audit aims to evaluate a range of care processes and outcomes, in order to identify good practice and areas for improvement in the care of women and babies looked after by NHS maternity services.

The NHS Staff Survey is a survey carried out by the NHS Survey Coordination Centre. The purpose of this survey is to collect staff views about working in their NHS organisation. Data is used to improve local working conditions for staff, and ultimately to improve patient care. The survey is administered annually so staff views can be monitored over time. 

The Doctors in Training survey is carried out by the General Medical Council (GMC). Every year the GMC survey all doctors in training and trainers for their views. This helps them make sure doctors in training receive high quality training in a safe and effective clinical environment, and trainers are well supported in their role. 

Our official statistics are published on a monthly basis. These publications contain all of the data used for the dashboard, including the data quality information, as well as other analyses of maternity services.