PMMS Information for Parents
Information for parents
If you live in the North of England and you have had baby that died before the age of one year since 1981, you and your baby's details will be on the Survey.
Why is the Perinatal Morbidity and Mortality Survey important?
We know that maternity services are changing. Most hospital Trusts in the north of England now offer separate facilities for midwifery-led care for low risk women, and hospital services for higher risk women are increasingly provided in bigger facilities with more expertise, more cover, and more staff. And the government is trying to increase choice for parents by making home births a more attractive option. But how do these changes affect the safety of women and their babies?
By collecting information on stillbirth, neonatal deaths and deaths up to a year of age, we are able to measure one aspect of the safety of babies in relation to their maternity care. We feed this information back to the various hospitals, and to the Primary Care Trusts that commission the hospital services.
What sort of data is collected?
Information about the mother, like age, address and previous obstetric history and about the baby, like birth weight and cause of death is collected on two different forms. First the RMSO is notified of a baby's death by a rapid report form. A CEMACH form follows when more details are known. These are filled in by hospital staff, including paediatricians and obstetricians.
There are new procedures for reviewing all child deaths, so how does the Perinatal Mortality Survey link with these?
On behalf of each of the Local Safeguarding Children’s Boards (LSCBs), the RMSO helps to identify all the child deaths that take place, and keeps a region-wide record of these on behalf of the LSCBs.
However, deaths in newborn babies (which often relate to prematurity, and to the hazards of pregnancy) are also monitored separately by the Confidential Enquiry into Maternal and Child Health (CEMACH). The RMSO acts on behalf of both these processes, identifying stillbirths, neonatal deaths and deaths in older children, and assisting LSCBs and CEMACH with their respective roles.
Why does the RMSO collect this information when it already collected by the LSCBs and CEMACH?
Because the RMSO has been collecting information on stillbirths and deaths up to a year of age for over 25 years, we are in a unique position to understand long term trends in the safety of maternity services in the north of England. Neither CEMACH nor the child death review process, which are both much more recent inventions, can take this perspective. We also collect a slightly different set of data than either of the national processes, and we have been consistent in the nature of the information we collect over the long term.
Because we are a regional organisation, closely linked to the doctors, midwives and nurses who deliver care to mothers and babies, we are able to move quickly to identify any adverse trends in our statistics, and we are able to help local teams to audit their work and set it in the context of the rest of the region.
Links: The Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths - FSID is the UK's leading baby charity aiming to prevent unexpected deaths in infancy and promote infant health. Stillbirth and Neonatal Death Society – SANDS offers support when a baby dies during pregnancy or after birth.
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