Downloadable document (PDF) highlighting the current state of progress of the Hub
Briefing paper (December2024)
Dear Colleagues,
Best wishes for the oh-so-fast-approaching festive season! And for renewed health and happiness in 2025.
We hope that this finds you well, and that you are looking forward to some down time with those important to you over the festive period.
One recommendation of The Best Start – A Five Year Forward Plan for Maternity and Neonatal Care in Scotland was to establish a Maternity and Neonatal Data Hub. Best Start also recommended that “…national level maternity and neonatal dashboards should be developed to facilitate benchmarking and reduce variations in care.”
Here’s a quick progress report on each of the Maternity and Neonatal Data Hub for Scotland’s five work streams over the last six months:
1 Manage a visible Maternity and Neonatal Data Hub for Scotland partnership
The hub is a collaboration involving five delivery partners (the Scottish Perinatal Network, Healthcare Improvement Scotland, Scottish Government, National Records of Scotland, and Public Health Scotland (PHS). We also maintain links to colleagues undertaking similar national work in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland (via twice-yearly meetings of a 4-nation maternal data group we established).
With the assistance of the Scottish Perinatal Network we maintain a web presence that includes links to the resources that the hub has developed.
We’d love to hear what you’ve found most useful. Let us know using the e-mails at the foot of this message.
2 Align Maternity and Neonatal Data Collection, extraction, and data flow
The Maternity and Neonatal Data Access Liaison Group for Scotland (MaNDALS) was established to share updates from multiple parallel conversations involving organisations who require all-Scotland-consistent data for national purposes from clinical information systems (mainly BadgerNet), and to align these conversations. The group met again in mid-November 2024.
We have developed a secure, automated mechanism to routinely transfer nationally-consistent maternity and neonatal data from BadgerNet systems into Public Health Scotland (PHS). We worked on this with colleagues in National Services Scotland Digital and Security (NSS: DaS) and with System C who provide the BadgerNet systems. The first data to be accessed in this way is antenatal booking and neonatal care data.
To support this, and after a lengthy set of negotiations, we have signed a Data Services Agreement between PHS and System C. This agreement will facilitate access to maternity and neonatal data that System C hold on behalf of Scottish NHS boards, where boards ask System C to allow access.
3 Establish new all-Scotland maternity data sets (Enhanced Maternity Dataset for Scotland; EMaDS)
During 2020 PHS established a new routine antenatal booking data collection (ABC). Numbers of pregnancies booked, and gestation at booking, based on ABC data are presented on the Scottish Pregnancy, Births and Neonatal Data (SPBAND) Dashboard. Official Statistics on numbers of pregnancies booked, gestation at booking, and smoking status, sourced from the Antenatal Booking Collection, are also published annually in the Antenatal Booking in Scotland publication.
ABC data is used to maintain a dynamic pregnancy cohort for linkage studies (the Scottish Linked Pregnancy and Baby Dataset, SLiPBD). SLiPBD is described in a data resource profile published earlier this year. A similar dynamic pregnancy cohort was used (in the COVID-19 in Pregnancy in Scotland (COPS) study) to monitor COVID vaccine uptake in pregnant women and investigate the effect of COVID-19 infection (and COVID-19 vaccination) on outcomes for mothers and babies. SLiPBD is now allowing PHS to do studies on medicines use in pregnancy. SLiPBD data also allows us to estimate how many people were pregnant at a point in time and therefore eligible for antenatal screening and immunisations.
PHS have created an expanded version 2 of the Antenatal Booking Collection (ABC2). We have also developed a Mother, Birth and Baby (MoBBa) dataset. MoBBa is intended to be deployed alongside the existing SMR02 to gather additional data on mothers, births and babies that is not included in SMR02. We plan to assess if ABC2 and MoBBa are fit-for-purpose by receiving one-off data transfers for each dataset. This has been delayed by us prioritising work to automate access to antenatal booking and neonatal care data. However, extraction scripts have now been prepared, we have developed an analytical plan and should receive data within the next couple of months.
We have continued to explore how we can capture data on miscarriage from ‘early pregnancy’ settings. A miscarriage (early pregnancy) dataset was previously reviewed by key contacts and Digital Midwives. Since most Health Boards use BadgerNet systems, we are exploring, with System C, how to access relevant data from BadgerNet Maternity and the BadgerNet Early Pregnancy and Gynaecology Unit (EPAGU) module. We intend to assess if the miscarriage (early pregnancy) dataset is fit-for-purpose by obtaining a one-off sample of the data. We are collecting permissions to do this and hope to receive the sample data within the next three months. We are also continuing to liaise with NHS Lothian to obtain required data items from Trak maternity.
4 Routine collection of data on specialist neonatal care (NeoCareIn+)
PHS developed a neonatal care dataset some time ago. We have been working with NHS National Services Scotland and System C to make the content of this dataset routinely available via the secure, automated mechanism mentioned earlier in this update. We have now enabled this secure mechanism to access BadgerNet Neonatal data (for babies receiving care in neonatal units on, and/or after, 01 January 2018). We need to check that data loads as expected onto the data platform, assess data completeness and conduct initial analyses. So, we do not anticipate routine outputs (either public or for the neonatal network) will be available until mid-2025.
5 Data displays showing maternity and neonatal CORE measures
We previously agreed CORE maternity measures for incorporation into maternity dashboards. From 2020 many of the CORE maternity measures were presented on a Wider Impacts (of COVID) dashboard. Pregnancy and Births and babies sections of the Wider Impacts dashboard were updated each month until Sep 2023. Those two sections were replaced in October 2023 by a new Scottish Pregnancy, Births and Neonatal Data (SPBAND) Dashboard. Data on SPBAND is refreshed quarterly (in January, April, July and October each year).
SPBAND includes the same topics as those that featured in the two sections of the Wider Impacts dashboard it replaces:
SPBAND offers three ways to view data: time series charts for individual measures and individual Health Boards; small multiple time series charts, to allow comparison (for a particular measure) across Health Board areas, and a multi-indicator overview that displays multiple measures simultaneously, allowing comparison across Health Board areas.
We are continuing to develop two additional neonatal measures to be included within SPBAND. These are:
We have established initial access to neonatal care data (see section 4 above) and, if our assessments of the data are positive, we plan to introduce these additional measures from the July 2025 SPBAND refresh.
The Health in the Early Years in Scotland (HEYS) dashboard includes information on infant feeding. Data is refreshed quarterly, most recently on 01 October 2024. A link to data on HEYS is available from the Infant feeding menu item on SPBAND.
We are continuing to maintain a Topics Index. As well as containing a list of the CORE maternity measures, this catalogues individual maternity and neonatal measures already available, including those on the Scottish Pregnancy, Births and Neonatal Data (SPBAND) Dashboard, Health in the Early Years in Scotland, Discovery, NMPA, NNAP, National Records of Scotland, and PHS websites. Although it is easy to edit, we appreciate the Google Sheets platform may not be available to all our users. However, if you cannot access Google Sheets and would like to view the Topics Index, please contact phs.matneodatahub@phs.scot and we will share the latest index with you.
Our colleagues in Public Health Scotland publish a series of annual Official Statistics on pregnancy, childbirth and the early care of babies born in Scotland.
Thank you for reading this update. If you have any queries or comments, please do get in touch and we will be happy to help you further.
Very best wishes for the festive season,
Alastair (on behalf of the MatNeo Data Hub team)
You can also contact us via our generic email address for the Hub Programme: phs.matneodatahub@phs.scot