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The latest annual report outlining maternity activity in English NHS hospitals during 2020-21 has been published by NHS Digital today.

NHS Maternity Statistics, England, 2020-21 brings together detailed information from the Maternity Services Dataset (MSDS) on activity carried out by Maternity Services relating to a mother and baby(s) and the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) database¹ on hospital care received before, during and after delivery.

The report includes detailed tables at national level for HES data on:

• Method of onset of labour
• Method of delivery
• Age of mother
• Deprivation
• Ethnicity
• Delivery complications
• Birth complications

Each of these tables is further broken down by additional dimensions such as gestation length, duration of hospital stay and birth status.

The report provides information from the MSDS on a range of measures reported at a mother’s booking appointment, as well as information on the labour and delivery along with babies’ demographics, diagnoses, and screening tests. 

MSDS data is classed as experimental statistics. Therefore, any figures from this dataset should be treated with caution, but it can provide useful information from the subset of women whose data it includes.

Read the full report

NHS Maternity Statistics, England, 2020-21

Notes for Editors

• The Office for National Statistics (ONS) collects information on births and maternities (maternities are equivalent to deliveries in HES). Most of the information, for both live births and stillbirths, is supplied to registrars by one or both parents. As it is a legal requirement to register all births, the ONS is the official source of delivery and birth counts and should be used for this in preference to HES and MSDS maternity data held by NHS Digital. The HES and MSDS maternity data held by NHS Digital provide additional information around pregnancies, deliveries, births, and babies, including information about the mother, her care throughout pregnancy, the mode of her delivery and her treatment during it, and activity after birth including baby’s first feed and the timing of skin-to-skin contact. Statistics published in this report using maternity data from HES are classified as Official Statistics reflecting its status as an established data source, those using data from MSDS are classified as Experimental Statistics as these are new official statistics undergoing evaluation.