Source · Select Committees · Health and Social Care Committee
Recommendation 14
14
Acknowledged
Insufficient ethnicity data on maternal morbidity prevents monitoring and improving outcomes.
Conclusion
Collecting robust, consistent, and equity-focused data on ethnicity and maternal morbidity is essential to enable health services to monitor and improve their services guiding improvements in maternal outcomes. Without it, it is significantly harder to produce accurate comparisons across all ethnic groups and evaluate disparities in maternal outcomes amongst different ethnicities, and gaps may obscure the true extent of disparities in outcomes for Black and other minority ethnic women. (Conclusion, Paragraph 79)
Government response summary AI-generated
The government strongly agrees on the essential role of robust ethnicity data for improving maternal outcomes and outlines the Ethnicity Recording Improvement Plan, including five areas for action, a new PRiSMM surveillance system by Q1 2026, and a Maternal Care Bundle by April 2026.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Government Response
Acknowledged
HM Government · verbatim extract
Acknowledged
We strongly agree with the committee that collecting robust, consistent and equity-focused data on ethnicity and maternal morbidity is essential to enable health services to monitor and improve their service delivery, thus guiding improvements in maternal outcomes. NHS England has worked closely with stakeholders, including ICBs and trusts, voluntary sector partners and national bodies such as the Office for National Statistics, to develop an Ethnicity Recording Improvement Plan. The plan sets out 5 areas for action by ICBs and providers that are essential to drive improved ethnicity recording practice, accurate recording and robust analysis to understand inequalities between groups. This includes: • providing clinical administrative staff with resources and training to support direct yet culturally sensitive conversations with patients about ethnicity recording • regularly reviewing completion of ethnicity fields across different services and carrying out improvement work to drive up completion where necessary • working to optimise patient record systems and forms to ensure that recording ethnicity is the easiest thing to do and supported by a user-friendly interface • using the data collected to: • understand ethnic health inequalities across services • carry out targeted interventions to remove barriers to access, experience and outcomes To support implementation of the plan when it is published, NHS England will work with systems and providers to disseminate good practice resources and remove barriers to improvement that can be addressed nationally, such as outdated ethnicity codes and fragmented data sets that require repeated recording of ethnicity for the same patient across services.
Read the full response on Parliament ↗