Maternity and Neonatal Equalities dashboard

As part of our commitment to transparency and continuous improvement, NHS England has launched a new interactive dashboard for Maternity and Neonatal Services. This follows a Secretary of State announcement in 2025, with the aim of achieving equality in these services for vulnerable groups in the long term.

The dashboard brings together key information to address health inequalities in maternity and neonatal care services from a range of data sources, with breakdowns by ethnicity and deprivation.

This beta v1.0 dashboard is designed to highlight disparities and help NHS trusts understand where differences exist between groups.

The dashboard's purpose is to make health inequalities visible, measurable, and actionable in maternity and neonatal services. This empowers NHS trusts to identify, understand, and eliminate disparities in care, with a particular focus on Black and Asian women and those from deprived backgrounds.

While the dashboard places a strong emphasis on highlighting inequalities experienced by groups that are often considered vulnerable or disadvantaged, its scope is not restricted to these populations alone. It is designed to monitor and address disparities wherever they occur, including among groups that may not traditionally be recognised as disadvantaged within Maternity and Neonatal services. This ensures a truly comprehensive approach to equality, reflecting the needs of all service users and promoting fairness across the board.

The dashboard supports the identification of these women who face the greatest disparities in service provision, quality of care and health outcomes. This will enable more targeted interventions and equitable support. 

The dashboard is designed to support NHS trusts, integrated care boards (ICBs), regional teams, and national bodies to identify and address health inequalities in Maternity and Neonatal Services. The dashboard also supports the public by providing transparency about the care received and the progress being made.

The key aims of the dashboard are to:

• provide transparency and accountability using baseline and the most recent available data
• support rapid identification of disparities so interventions can be targeted and prioritised
• monitor and demonstrate the impact of interventions, enabling timely course correction where interventions are not effective
• act as a benchmarking tool across trusts to support the sharing of best practice
• inform forecasting and modelling work
• support the National Maternity Safety Ambition

First iteration (beta v1.0)

A dashboard working group was formed to gather potential metrics and ran a prioritisation exercise to assess 3 key factors: usefulness, data availability, and sample size. The metrics in this first iteration represent those that scored highest across these criteria, and which were deemed feasible to produce in the given timescales.

Future iterations

The dashboard working group and its related Steering Group are developing a list of potential metrics for future versions. We welcome suggestions about what to include next. Email your ideas to: [email protected] or complete our feedback form.

The next iteration of the dashboard is expected to be released later in 2026, with latest data and will incorporate any improvements following user feedback. It is yet to be decided if the next release will include any new contents in terms of metrics or if these will be added to a later release.

Neonatal data

The first iteration of the dashboard focuses on metrics that are already published and could feasibly be broken down by ethnicity and deprivation within the required publication timeframe. For now, only information on neonatal deaths is available within the Mortality section of the dashboard using national MBRRACE-UK data.

There is a clear intention to build on this foundation in future iterations, including the development of neonatal‑specific metrics as data availability and reporting timelines allow. The inclusion of 'Neonatal' in the title therefore reflects both the scope based on the current metric and our commitment to expanding this area in subsequent versions.

We are linked up with the National Neonatal Audit Programme (NNAP) and are scoping out what data is feasible to include in future iterations.

This beta v1.0 dashboard brings together previously published data from a range of sources, with ethnicity and deprivation breakdowns now available. The data sources are as follows:

MBRRACE-UK (Mothers and Babies: Reducing Risk through Audits and Confidential Enquiries across the UK) – this presents information on mortality, covering stillbirths, neonatal deaths and maternal deaths at national level. Data is available in annual time periods, with the maternal deaths data for rolling 3-year time periods, not single year. MBRRACE-UK publish further information on their methodologies and definitions.

Maternity Survey, Care Quality Commission – this provides information on service user experience of care at national and regional level, based on how women felt their concerns had been dealt with during labour. Data is available in annual time periods. CQC publish further information on their survey methodologies and definitions.

Maternity Services Data Set (MSDS), NHS England – this presents information on service provision and outcomes at national and NHS trust level. To provide context, this covers data quality metrics on ethnicity completeness for the mother and whether deprivation could be identified from the data submitted. There are 6 metrics covering:

• mother's ethnicity at booking appointment
• level of deprivation at booking appointment (based on mother's residence)
• gestational age at booking
• mode of birth
• postpartum haemorrhage
• pre-term birth

Data is available in 6-monthly time periods or 12-monthly time periods (with rolling time periods for appropriate metrics). There is currently some known duplication within reporting, the details of which can be found in the Limitations of the data section of the Appendices.

More detail about how the data is presented from all 3 data sources and how to interpret the findings are also provided in the Appendices.

A data definitions table that supports the downloadable csv data files, can be found in Appendix C of the Appendices.

The table sets out the columns included in each file, and their definitions.

Investigative tool

All data shown is already routinely collected locally through existing processes. You should use the dashboard as a prompt to investigate what might be driving any variation. We encourage trusts to combine the dashboard findings with local intelligence, qualitative insights and contextual factors to build a full picture of what is happening in your population and plan to address these disparities accordingly.

NHS England will not use this dashboard as a performance tool for NHS trusts, nor will it be used for monitoring or governance purposes.

Comparability

Using the MSDS data, it is possible to compare an NHS trust with another, and against the England average. The easiest way to do this is to use the Equalities MSDS data file. You can then filter the NHS trusts you would like to compare and the respective metrics. This can be repeated for England data. You can also do this in the dashboard, but you are only able to see the metric information for one NHS trust at a time.

We don’t currently have an integrated care board (ICB) or local maternity and neonatal system (LMNS) breakdown in the MSDS data. We hope to include this in a future version. In the meantime, if you know all the NHS trust names in the ICB or LMNS of interest, then you can select all the metric information for these trusts in the Equalities MSDS data file and compare these.

Comparing organisations against one another can be a helpful indicator of potential areas of disparity for further investigation. It can also help to understand variation in performance, but drawing conclusions from this data should always be done cautiously. The sections below detail some factors that users must have in mind when using data to compare one organisation against another. For example, outcomes in some areas deteriorate during the winter due to increased overall demand.

Types of trust

It is important to bear in mind that different NHS trusts will look after different communities and each will have their own set of challenges. Because of that, a trust with good outcomes reported doesn’t automatically mean it is better than others. It isn’t always fair to compare, for example, a small rural trust with a large city teaching hospital or a specialist centre, because they treat different communities.

Lag times

As varied data sources have been used, the lag times in terms of data becoming available will differ for each. Some metrics look at different time periods, so you should be careful when comparing multiple metrics as they might not all cover the same periods.

Mergers and acquisitions

Sometimes NHS trusts join together, or one trust takes over another. This can affect activity data. For example, a well-performing trust might take on a struggling one and see its results drop because it inherits certain issues.

When looking at trust data, it’s important to check whether there’s been a recent merger or takeover. You can find details about all mergers and acquisitions on our website.

The development of this dashboard involved key stakeholders through a Dashboard Working Group, which helped define the initial requirements. User testing was also carried out across regions prior to the launch of this beta version. We addressed as much of this feedback as actionable within the timescales for this release. We expect to incorporate any remaining feedback into the next iteration.

We will keep the metrics and data presentation under review to identify areas where they can be improved, and to ensure they continue to align with NHS priorities.

We welcome feedback and suggestions to support ongoing improvements and development of the dashboard ahead of beta v2.0, expected to be released later in 2026. To provide feedback, contact us using our feedback form.

For any general questions related to policy or content of the dashboard, contact: [email protected]

For technical or accessibility issues with the dashboard, contact the National Service Desk at: [email protected] or on 0300 3035 035.

See information about accessibility.

User access to the private portal (dashboard) is strictly subject to the Dashboard End User Access Agreement. 

By accessing the data through the private portal, you are accepting the terms of the Dashboard End User Access Agreement. 

Data may be downloaded and analysed using other analytical tools but must not be shared outside the user’s organisation.