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 January to March 2024, 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.

Data for NHS Borders for planned and unplanned caesarean births show some unusual patterns from April 2022 to date. We have been liaising with NHS Borders and believe this to be a recording issue rather than a true reflection of the numbers. We are working with the board to try to further understand and rectify the issue.

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 can be found in the Metadata document.

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 01 October 2024.