Technical Report: linking the National Maternity and Perinatal Audit Data Set to the National Neonatal Research Database for 2015/16

Abstract

The National Maternity and Perinatal Audit (NMPA) is a national audit of the NHS maternity services across England, Scotland and Wales, commissioned in July 2016 by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) on behalf of NHS England, the Welsh Government and the Health Department of the Scottish Government. The NMPA is led by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) in partnership with the Royal College of Midwives (RCM), the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). The overarching aim of the NMPA is to produce high-quality information about NHS maternity and neonatal services which can be used by providers, commissioners and users of the services to benchmark against national standards and recommendations where these exist, and to identify good practice and areas for improvement in the care of women and babies. This short report from the NMPA explores the feasibility of linking the NMPA data set, which contains data relating to the majority of women who give birth, to the National Neonatal Research Database (NNRD), which contains detailed information about the majority of babies admitted to a neonatal unit. This feasibility study is limited to linkage between neonatal records and maternity records in England, as a pilot for developing this linkage across England, Scotland and Wales. The linkage of neonatal data to maternity data offers many potential advantages. In particular, it allows the exploration of associations between maternal antenatal and intrapartum factors and neonatal outcomes. It also offers the potential to use one or more neonatal outcomes, such as admission to neonatal care, as an outcome measure of maternity care, and to explore variation in neonatal outcomes between maternity settings. The purpose of this report is to describe the feasibility of linking the NMPA data set with the NNRD data set. It describes the technical process of linking these data sets and explores whether this linked data set can be used on an annual basis to construct clinically relevant measures of maternity care.