The Maternity Services Data Set has been developed as a key driver to achieving better outcomes of care for mothers and babies.
The data set will provide comparative, mother and child-centric data that will include information on the amount of care provided and the specific care received. This then can be used to improve clinical quality and service efficiency; and to commission services in a way that improves health and reduces inequalities.
This report has been produced to identify the current sources of maternity data, and consider the difficulties currently faced in the reporting of these statistics. The Maternity Services Data Set should address some of these difficulties by collecting and linking much of this information together.
The information presented within this report represents and brings together the available maternity data currently published from various data sources, thereby creating a "Compendium of maternity data".