Better Births recommended that multi-professional teams and their organisations must be able to regularly compare their own outcomes over time and with their peers, to track, benchmark and improve the quality of maternity services. This should be facilitated by a nationally agreed set of indicators.

The Data and Information Sharing work stream of the Maternity Transformation Programme has an agreed set of National Maternity Indicators and Clinical Quality Improvement Metrics. To enable clinical teams and organisations to compare data, the work stream has commissioned NHS Digital to develop a national maternity data viewer, comprising of two components; The Maternity Services Dashboard and a further analytical tool (not yet released) for more in-depth interrogation of the Maternity Services Data Set.

The Maternity Services Dashboard

The Maternity Services Dashboard component of the national data viewer has been published on NHS Digital’s website. The dashboard contains:

• the National Maternity Indicators and Clinical Quality Improvement Metrics (CQIMs) for comparison between providers
• an organisational profile for each trust showing descriptive data on their cohorts of women
• the above data also grouped by Local Maternity System (LMS), providing an instant view of how providers within LMSs are performing.
• A rating on data quality for providers on each CQIM to show where data quality needs to improve

The Maternity Services Dashboard will be updated iteratively based on feedback from users and regular review by the work stream 6 Oversight Group. For comments on the dashboard, please email maternityanalysis@nhs.net.

Future development

The development of an additional tool for bespoke analytical queries is also being commenced to support Local Maternity Systems to create their own data-driven outcomes for monitoring and improvement purposes. The tool is expected to be available in early 2019/20 to coincide with the launch of the new version of the Maternity Services Data Set.