Establishing a National Maternal Morbidity Outcome Indicator in England

Published on Friday, 08 April 2016 Tweet

As maternal deaths become rarer, monitoring near-miss or severe maternal morbidity becomes important as a tool to measure changes in care quality. It has been suggested that routinely available hospital administration data could be used to monitor the quality of maternity care.

NPEU researchers Manisha Nair, Jenny Kurinczuk and Marian Knight carried out a study to investigate the feasibility of creating a National Maternal Morbidity Outcome Indicator using routinely available hospital maternity data in England. The study, published in PLoS One, used Health and Social care Information Centre (HSCIC) in-patient data from 6.39 million women giving birth in England from April 2003 to March 2013 and showed that a composite indicator to monitor trends in maternal morbidity outcomes during childbirth can be generated using routine English hospital data, but the quality and reliability of this monitoring indicator is dependent on the quality of the hospital data, which is currently inadequate.

For more details read the paper.