The latest annual report outlining maternity activity in English NHS hospitals during 2019-20 has been published by NHS Digital today.
NHS Maternity Statistics, England, 2019-20 brings together detailed information from the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) database on hospital care received before, during and after delivery.
The report includes detailed tables at the national level for:
- Method of onset of labour
- Method of delivery
- Age of mother
- Deprivation
- Ethnicity
- Delivery complications
- Birth complications
Each of these tables is further broken down by additional dimensions such as gestation length, duration of hospital stay and birth status.
The report provides information from the Maternity Services Dataset (MSDS) on a range of measures reported at a mother’s booking appointment, as well as information on the labour and delivery along with babies’ demographics, diagnoses and screening tests.
This is the first year that we have published data from the new MSDS v2.0, so the data in this year’s report may not be comparable with previous years.
MSDS data is classed as experimental statistics. Therefore, any figures from this dataset should be treated with caution, but it can provide useful information from the subset of women whose data it includes.
