Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to (a) ensure that data collection on maternity care outcomes is disaggregated by ethnicity and (b) reduce gaps in this data.

Data on a woman’s ethnic background is routinely collected by services at multiple points throughout maternity care. This data is used to disaggregate reporting of adverse outcomes, like maternal mortality, by ethnicity. Differences by ethnicity are also reported as part of the Care Quality Commission’s annual survey, which asks a sample of pregnant women and new mothers about their experience of National Health Service maternity services.

NHS trusts are incentivised to collect this information through the Maternity Incentive Scheme, which is a financial incentive program designed to enhance maternity safety within NHS trusts. Safety Action 2 of the Maternity Incentive Scheme incentivises trusts to submit digital information, including ethnicity data, to the Maternity Services Data Set.

The levels of completeness are high, and gaps are rare. 95% of women who gave birth in 2023/24 had their ethnic background recorded.