Scottish pregnancy, births and neonatal data dashboard
A new home for maternity and neonatal data visualisations

About this release

This release of the Scottish Pregnancy, Births and Neonatal Data (SPBAND) 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 October to December 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. 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 that says: ‘national level maternity and neonatal dashboards should be developed to facilitate benchmarking and reduce variations in care’.

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.

Further information

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. 

Revisions made in this release: the CSV download files have been replaced with accessible Excel download files with metadata included. Also, some links have been updated and some titles, labels, legends and metadata have been standardised.

Corrections made in this release: We have detected errors in the way that revised medians for average gestation were calculated for NHS Forth Valley and NHS Tayside after changes in the process for recording booking. These errors, and separate errors affecting calculations of shifts relative to these medians, have now been corrected. Further details are given in the notes in the download file.

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
• Antenatal Booking in Scotland
• Termination of Pregnancy Statistics

The next release of this publication will be 02 July 2024.