About this release

This first release of the Scottish Pregnancy, Births and Neonatal Data (SPBAND) (external website) dashboard by Public Health Scotland (PHS) presents data on CORE measures related to care in 'Pregnancy' and for 'Births and babies' in Scotland. This includes: number of pregnancies booked for antenatal care; number of terminations; gestation at booking; gestation at termination; location of extremely pre-term births; induction of labour; type of birth; perineal tears; gestation at birth; stillbirths and infant deaths and Apgar scores.

For most measures data are presented for each Health Board of Residence (based on home postcode) and for each Health Board of Treatment (based on where care was delivered).

Birth data submitted from maternity units are thought to be incomplete for NHS Highland in April to June 2023, so indicators under the 'Births and babies' tab (with the exception of the stillbirths and infant deaths indicator which is sourced from the National Records of Scotland) are likely to change in future data presentations. Therefore results for boards with incomplete data must be treated with caution.

Background

The data displays in the SPBAND dashboard have been developed in response to commitment 67 in The Best Start: five year plan for maternity and neonatal care (gov.uk) that says: 'national level maternity and neonatal dashboards should be developed to facilitate benchmarking and reduce variations in care’'

In general, the measures shown are the same as those presented in the 'Pregnancy' and 'Births and babies' sections of the previously-provided Wider Impacts of COVID dashboard (external website), which was updated for the last time at the start of September 2023 and then retired.

The 'Stillbirths and infant deaths' charts are now based on data released quarterly by National Records of Scotland. The 'Location of extremely pre-term births' now includes babies born at 22 weeks gestation as well as those born at 23-26 weeks inclusive.

The Wider Impacts dashboard showed time series charts for individual measures and individual Health Boards. Public Health Scotland recognise that additional ways of looking at the data are helpful and so this dashboard also offers alternative data views, including time series charts to allow comparison (for a particular measure) across Health Board areas, and a multi-indicator board comparison to display multiple indicators for Health Board areas. 

Further information

The next release of this quarterly publication will be 16 January 2024.

Data are shown for up to and including the most recent period for which records are considered near complete. Data for the most recent period should be viewed as provisional. Data for the whole time period shown will be refreshed every time the dashboard page is updated, and data for the most recent periods are likely to change slightly as additional records are submitted to PHS. 

Further analysis and interpretation of annual rates and trends for some measures shown on this dashboard will also be published in the following PHS annual reports:

• Births in Scotland, which is a National Statistics publication for Scotland
• Antenatal Booking in Scotland, which is an Official Statistics publication for Scotland
• Termination of Pregnancy Statistics, which is a National Statistics publication for Scotland