Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she is taking to measure progress made by initiatives to tackle health inequalities in maternity care in the black and Asian community.

NHS England’s three-year delivery plan for maternity and neonatal services outlines an ambition to reduce inequalities for all in access, experience, and outcomes, and provide targeted support where health inequalities exist. As part of this plan, NHS England will utilise several metrics to track the impact on maternity and neonatal outcomes based on ethnicity, to measure progress towards improving equity for mothers and babies. These metrics are of sufficient sensitivity and statistical power to track changes in clinical outcomes for the groups most at risk of adverse outcomes.

Ethnic coding data completeness has improved year on year since 2019, helping to better understand health outcomes for different ethnic groups. NHS Resolution’s Maternity Incentive Scheme safety action two also sets a data quality standard to improve ethnic coding data completeness.