Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to the Report of the Morecambe Bay Investigation by Dr Bill Kirkup, published in March 2015, what steps his department has taken to improve recording systems for perinatal deaths.

The Government has introduced measures to improve the systematic recording of perinatal deaths.

The Perinatal Mortality Review Tool was launched in 2018 to support National Health Service trusts to undertake systematic, multidisciplinary, high quality reviews of the circumstances and care leading up to and surrounding each stillbirth and neonatal death. Reports from the tool enable organisations providing and commissioning care to identify emerging themes across a number of deaths to support learning and changes in the delivery and commissioning of care to improve future care and prevent the future deaths which are avoidable.

In May 2019, MBRRACE-UK introduced a new real-time data monitoring tool, incorporated into the MBRRACE-UK web-based system. The tool allows registered users of the MBRRACE-UK surveillance system to monitor, filter and summarise the perinatal deaths reported for their organisation, using live surveillance data from the MBRRACE-UK system.