Rapid Quarterly Reporting

NMPA Rapid Quarterly Reporting presents timely data on care practices and maternity outcomes in NHS hospitals in England. It is designed to support service improvement; to provide information to women and families on results in their local NHS hospital; and to allow evaluation of national trends. We hope that the reported results are used by healthcare professionals, managers, commissioners, collaborative networks and national organisations, and women and families using NHS maternity services.

There are two types of measure reported. We report on care practices, which provide contextual information about the care given and any interventions used at the time of delivery; and on maternity outcomes, which tell us about the health of the mother and baby after delivery. For each NHS hospital we also report on data quality: how well the essential items needed to compare results are recorded by staff at the hospitals.

The data come from the Hospital Episodes Statistics database. HES captures information on each inpatient admission to NHS hospitals in England, with each record containing information including the patient’s diagnoses and procedures done at the hospital. HES data are available quickly, which allows reporting of the most recent results, but they do not contain all the measures which are reported in our annual Clinical Report. For a full comparison of the measures included in the two types of reporting, please see our FAQs. As well as regular refreshes of the data, over time revisions are planned to this section of our website to expand and improve the content.