At last---maternity statistics for England

BMJ 1998;316:566-567 ( 21 February )

Editorials

At last $---$ maternity statistics for England

Some trends are apparent but the data still have too many gaps

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

After a long gestation the Department of Health has finally delivered a bulletin on maternity statistics.¹ Few routinedata on maternity care in England have been published since 1985,the last year of the old Hospital In-patient Enquiry. This lackhas been equally frustrating to people who want to compare localperformance with national statistics and those who want to monitornational trends. ² ³ Not surprisingly, the new statisticsshow many changes in maternity care since 1985, while revealinginadequacies in the data.

The Maternity Hospital Episode Statistics system,⁴ through which the data are collected, started in April 1989, and thenew publication contains data for 1994-5 and trends since 1989-90.It is restricted to data about care during delivery, but a furtherbulletin with data for 1995-6 and 1996-97, including antenataland postnatal episodes and data about newborn babies, is promisedfor the autumn. Subsequent bulletins will then appear annually.

The most dramatic changes are . . . [Full text of this article]

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