For England the various intervention rates that are displayed on this site are not calculated by individual hospitals, but by the Statistics Division of the Department of Health.
Data on in-patient care delivered by NHS hospitals in England is collected through Hospital Episode Statistics (HES). Each patient, including every woman who gives birth in hospital, has a HES Record. Each record relates to an individual and contains over 50 items of data. Most maternity details are recorded on a special extension (the "maternity tail") to the general core HES record. These records are submitted to the Statistics Division who then aggregate the information to calculate intervention rates for each hospital. HES records are also designed to cover home births, although in practice coverage is very poor.
The collated maternity statistics are published by the Department of Health and are published in a Statistical Bulletin.21
Although many hospitals achieve a 100% records for submitting their HES records, unfortunately many hospitals fail to submit these records or else they are not of sufficient quality to be used by the Department of Health. Hospitals which have failed to produce usable HES records for over 50% of their births are shown in these tables.
We are often asked why statistics for some hospitals are missing: the reason is simply that those hospitals have failed in their duty to supply the relevant information to the DoH. We at BirthChoiceUK believe that maternity units should be fully accountable for the services they provide and that they should provide the data for independently collated maternity statistics.
We would encourage MSLC representatives for hospitals where the data are missing, to ensure that the proper submission of HES data (and in particular the maternity tail data) is on the agenda at your next meeting. (For more details go to www.doh.gov.uk/hes.)
For Scotland maternity statistics are produced by the NHS Scotland Information and Statistics Division (ISD. These are published on the web as Births in Scottish Hospitals. 22
For Wales maternity statistics are published in the All Wales Perinatal Survey Annual Report.23 Unfortunately the only intervention rates collated for each hospital are Caesarean rates. We hope that in the future other interventions such as induction and assisted delivery will be included.
For Northern Ireland there are no published national statistics.
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