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Childbirth

Answer

The information is not available in the format requested. The following table shows the total deliveries¹ for Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust broken down by month the episode ended².

	2006-07	2005-06
Total deliveries	8,786	8,468
April	711	700
May	748	731
June	731	662
July	763	788
August	786	668
September	746	707
October	759	736
November	705	692
December	753	740
January	706	667
February	635	641
March	743	736
Notes:
¹
Finished Consultant Delivery Episode
(FCE): A FCE is defined as a period of admitted patient care under one consultant within one health care provider. FCEs are counted against the year in which the FCE finishes. We have provided a count of total deliveries measured by delivery episode and other delivery event:
maternity events taking place in either national health service (NHS) hospitals or in non-NHS hospitals funded by the NHS will be recorded as ordinary ““Delivery””.
““other Delivery events”” are delivery events other than those resulting in delivery or birth episodes under NHS funding or in any other facility supplied under a service agreement with the NHS.
Coverage and data quality
: the maternity tail data coverage is not as complete as the rest of HES data. There are a number of reasons for the coverage and data quality issues such as:
trusts submitting a significantly higher number of delivery episodes compared to birth episodes
trusts failing to submit data on the number of birth episodes where they record a high number of delivery episodes
trusts failing to submit delivery—the reason for this is that approximately 20 trusts have a standalone maternity system which is not linked to the Patient Administration System
trusts identifying a high number of maternity beds available, but not recording any information about deliveries or births
trusts identifying that they have no maternity beds available, but recording a high number of birth and delivery episodes
some trusts have space in their maternity system to record nine birth tails, whereas other systems have space for 18. As deliveries, miscarriages and abortions are all recorded in the birth tail, there are cases where nine tails is not enough to record all of the relevant data.
Between 2001-02 and 2005-06, coverage of hospital deliveries was 72.6 per cent. on average, whereas that of home deliveries was 13.6 per cent. on average. The incomplete coverage problem is significantly compounded by the data quality issues outlined above.
²
Date episode ended
—This field contains the date on which a patient left the care of a particular consultant, for one of the following reasons: discharged from hospital (includes transfers) or moved to the care of another consultant.
A null entry either indicates that the episode was unfinished at the end of the data year, or the date was unknown.
Ungrossed data
—Figures have not been adjusted for shortfalls in the data,
i.e.
the data are ungrossed.
Data quality
—HES are compiled from data sent by over 300 NHS trusts and primary care trusts (PCTs) in England. Data is also received from a number of independent sector organisations for activity commissioned by the English NHS. The Information Centre for health and social care liaises closely with these organisations to encourage submission of complete and valid data and seeks to minimise inaccuracies and the effect of missing and invalid data via HES processes. While this brings about improvement over time, some shortcomings remain.
Quality of care
—Data derived from HES cannot be used in isolation to evaluate the quality of care provided by NHS trusts or clinical teams. There are many factors that can affect the outcome of treatment and it is beyond the scope of HES to adequately record and reflect all of these.
HES figures are available from 1989-90 onwards. The quality and coverage of the data have improved over time. These improvements in information submitted by the NHS have been particularly marked in the earlier years and need to be borne in mind when analysing time series. Some of the increase in figures for later years (particularly 2006-07 onwards) may be due to the improvement in the coverage of independent sector activity. Changes in NHS practice also need to be borne in mind when analysing time series. For example, a number of procedures may now be undertaken in outpatient settings and may no longer be accounted for in the HES data. This may account for any reductions in activity over time.
Source:
Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), The Information Centre for health and social care.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

486 c817-20W; 245670

Session

2008-09

Subjects

Childbirth Yorkshire and the Humber

Contains statistics

Yes

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk