‘The Best Start – A Five Year Forward Plan for Maternity and Neonatal Care in Scotland’, published in January 2017, reports the findings of the Scottish Government’s Review of Maternity and Neonatal Services in Scotland. Recommendation 70 of ‘The Best Start’ is to develop a national maternity and neonatal care data hub and recommendation 67 is “…national level maternity and neonatal dashboards should be developed to facilitate benchmarking and reduce variations in care”.
Engagement in 2018 with the maternity and neonatal services community allowed us to agree what a data hub should include, and to develop the following vision statement for the MatNeo Data Hub:
To ensure the Best Start for mothers and babies in Scotland, a maternity and neonatal data hub should be established to: coordinate collection and verification of all Scottish related neonatal and maternity data; streamline data collection; reduce duplication of data entry; ensure access to relevant data, and support data use to commission, operate and improve services.
The hub was established in 2019 as a collaboration involving five delivery partners (Public Health Scotland, the Scottish Strategic Perinatal Network, Healthcare Improvement Scotland, Scottish Government, and National Records of Scotland). We maintain links to colleagues undertaking similar national work in England (NHS Digital) and Wales, to UK-wide audits and with IT system suppliers.
The five workstreams are shown below:
