The National Maternity and Perinatal Audit (NMPA) is a national audit of the NHS maternity services across England, Scotland and Wales, commissioned in July 2016 by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP) on behalf of NHS England, the Welsh Government and the Health Department of the Scottish Government. The NMPA is led by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) in partnership with the Royal College of Midwives (RCM), the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).
The overarching objective of the NMPA is to produce high-quality information about NHS maternity and neonatal services that can be used by providers,commissioners and users of the services to benchmark against national standards and recommendations where these exist, and to identify good practice and areas for improvement in the care of women and babies.
This report focuses on maternal admissions to intensive care in England, Wales and Scotland. The NMPA, and the data it holds, offers a unique opportunity to link maternity data, which contain information about the mother, her pregnancy and her baby, to data from national data sets for intensive care admissions.
The purpose of this report is to describe the feasibility of linking the NMPA’s maternity data to intensive care data and to evaluate the suitability of rates of maternal admission to intensive care as an indicator of care quality. It also describes the demographics of women admitted to intensive care and the reasons for admission.