Blood stream infections in NHS Maternity and Perinatal Care for women and their babies: a feasibility report of linking maternity, neonatal and infection datasets in England. London: RCOG; 2023

The aim of this report was to link datasets that contain information about mothers, their babies, and infection data. The NMPA has been unable to obtain linked datasets within the timeframe of the audit programme contract, which ended on 31 December 2022. Therefore, this report focusses on how important it is to join together the datasets that hold different information about infections during and after pregnancy in women and birthing people and their babies. For example, data collected about pregnancy, labour and birth, information about infections and data about admissions to hospital. Had the joined dataset been available, this could have been used to look at aspects of maternity care and outcomes specifically for women and birthing people who had a bloodstream infection during pregnancy or in the six weeks after birth; and for babies who had a bloodstream or CSF infection in the first 3 days of life. Ongoing linkage of these datasets could be used for longer term surveillance of infection and antimicrobial use in women and birthing people, and babies