Maternity and birth

Hospital activity

The Scottish Morbidity Record (SMR02) is submitted by maternity hospitals to ISD Scotland. This data scheme collects data on inpatient and day case activity in the specialty of obstetrics. A wide range of information is collected, including: mother's age, height, smoking history and previous obstetric history; outcome of pregnancy, mode of delivery, induction and analgesia; and baby's birthweight, gestation, apgar score and gender. This information has been collected since 1975. Although there is no legal requirement to submit this data to ISD, the SMR02 data scheme achieves national coverage of 98% of all births and pregnancies.

Details of the information collected is given on the ISD website and SMR02 statistics are presented on the maternity and births section of the ISD website.

For data quality of SMR02, see Timeliness of SMRs, Completeness of SMRs and an ISD QA team looked at the quality of the SMR02 data in 2017-18.
 

Scottish Birth Record (SBR)

The Scottish Birth Record can be used to record all of a baby's neonatal care in Scotland, including readmissions and transfers. The SBR started collecting data in 2002 and has now been rolled out throughout Scotland. Further details  are included on the ISD website. Note this replaced the SMR11 data collection.
 

Registered birth records

Definitive information on numbers of registered births in Scotland is available from the National Records for Scotland vital events pages.