maternity

There are a number of settings within maternity services, which may benefit from the power of data visualisation, and useful data analysis has been at the centre of recommendations to improve maternity care over the past decade.

Communication with women

The first is in communicating with the women and families we look after. This may be done with a simple infographic such as the ones below, or it may be that women would value the ability to use interactive data visualisations to compare services, for example.

Individual maternity services

Individual maternity services use dashboards within their service to monitor various outcomes for women, the babies born and for the service. Here is an example from the RCOG ‘Good Practice’ document, January 2008.

Good Practice No. 7: Maternity Dashboard: Clinical Performance and Governance Score Card. It is an example card used by a London teaching hospital

National picture of maternity services

This extract is taken from the NHSDigital website section relating to the Maternity 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.”

Looking at the Maternity Dashboard today we can get the following data visuals.