Infant Mortality

(asked on 9th September 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what progress they have made towards halving rates of stillbirths, neonatal and maternal deaths, and brain injuries occurring during or soon after birth from 2010 levels by 2025 as announced as part of their maternity strategy in November 2017.


Answered by
Lord Bethell Portrait
Lord Bethell
This question was answered on 20th October 2020

Overall, the outcome data shows that maternity and neonatal services are making clear progress to achieve the Maternity Safety Ambition for a 20% reduction in these outcomes by 2020 and a 50% reduction by 2025. Since 2010, there has been a 25% reduction in the stillbirth rate, a 26% reduction in the neonatal mortality rate for babies born over the 24-week gestational age of viability and a 14% reduction in the maternal mortality rate.

According to a definition developed to monitor the ambition, the brain injury rate fell to 5.1 per 1,000 births in 2017, after rising from 4.9 to 5.4 per 1,000 births between 2012 and 2014. The rate of term infants with hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy fell by 11.8% between 2014 and 2017.

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