Contextual Overview
The Maternity and Children’s Data Set has been developed as a key driver to achieving better outcomes of care for mothers, babies and children. The data set will provide comparative, mother and child-centric data that will include information on incidence and care that can be used to improve clinical quality and service efficiency; and to commission services in a way that improves health and reduces inequalities. The child health element of the data set covers all stages of the care pathway across primary, secondary and tertiary sectors from birth until the day before the 19th birthday and/or transition into adult services. The initial data collection will concentrate on the data required to support the Healthy Child Programme and will for the first time:
- allow maternal and child health data to be linked so that vital information can be used to improve services
- provide comparative data (demographics, equalities, interventions and outcomes from pregnancy through childhood) so that health visiting services can be directed to areas with most need
- provide planners, commissioners and managers with reliable information on service delivery, which can be used to inform future planning and service improvements
- improve accountability, making it easier for the public to access comparative information to support them in making decisions about type and place of care
- record outcomes to contribute to clinical risk management and governance to reduce litigation costs
- underpin the improvement of local information systems to meet data set standards.
Data Collection
The Children and Young People's Health Service Secondary Uses Data Set provides the definitions for data:
- to be lodged in the data warehouse regularly and routinely
- to be assembled, compiled and to flow into a secondary uses data warehouse
- to provide timely, pseudonymised patient-based data and information for purposes other than direct clinical care, e.g. planning, commissioning, public health, clinical audit, performance improvement, research, clinical governance.
Data is expected to be collected from various clinical systems, collated and assembled through the compiler. This standard is intended to facilitate electronic data recording and reporting but it is not intended to create clinical records for Children's and Young People's Health Services or to enable other systems to interoperate with other clinical systems.
Submission Information
For submission information, see the Maternity and Childrens Data Sets Submission Requirements.
Further Guidance
Further guidance has been produced by the Health and Social Care Information Centre and is available on their website at: Children's and Young People's Health Services (CYPHS) Secondary Uses Data Set.