NHS Scotland performance against LDP standards

Performance data on the current Local Delivery Plan (LDP) Standards - priorities set and agreed between the Scottish Government and NHS Boards to provide assurance on NHS Scotland performance. 


LDP Standard

At least 80% of pregnant women in each SIMD (Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation) quintile will have booked for antenatal care by the 12th week of gestation.

Current national performance

In 2020/21 the lowest performance in any SIMD quintile at the national level was 88.5%.

About this LDP standard

There is evidence that those women at highest risk of poor pregnancy outcomes are less likely to access antenatal care early and/or have a poorer experience of that care.

Access to high quality, relationship based antenatal care with a strong focus on prevention, promotion of health, early intervention and support as early as possible in pregnancy is vitally important.

Ensuring preconceptual health is fundamental to good outcomes for women and babies. However, the first two trimesters following conception are also vitally important. They are periods of significant fetal development and are when fetal development is most vulnerable to the impact of adverse maternal biopsychosocial circumstances. For example maternal stress, use of tobacco, drugs and alcohol and poor nutrition. Most pregnant women are highly motivated to do all they can to ensure the best outcomes for their babies, early and ongoing engagement with women as early as possible in the pregnancy is therefore vitally important.

The Scottish Government has allocated funding to support NHS National Services Scotland‘s Public Health Scotland to review current data and monitoring systems to help NHS Health Boards improve the quality of the data they submit. The Refreshed Framework for Maternity Care Implementation Support Group are also developing a set of quality measures to support boards measure continuous improvement in antenatal care.

Performance against this standard

The national standard is for at least 80% of pregnant woman in each SIMD quintile to have booked for antenatal care by the 12th week of gestation.

The SIMD provides a relative measure of deprivation which means that the main output from SIMD - the SIMD ranks - can be used to compare data zones by providing a relative ranking. In this standard SIMD quintiles are used to measure performance, this method gives each data zone a value from most deprived (rank 1) to least deprived (rank 5).

For the year ending March 2021, the lowest performance in any SIMD quintile at the national level was 88.35% (i.e. 88.5% of pregnant women had booked for antenatal care by the 12th week of gestation for the year ending March 2021).

The graph below shows national performance on the Antenatal Care standard since 2011/12.

NHS Board level performance is shown for the most recent time period in the table below.

The table below shows the lowest percentage of pregnant women in any of the SIMD quintiles that booked for antenatal care by the 12th week of gestation, by NHS Board, for financial year 2020/21.

NHS Board

Financial Year 2020/21

NHS AYRSHIRE & ARRAN

90.3%

NHS BORDERS

86.7%

NHS DUMFRIES & GALLOWAY

85.4%

NHS FIFE

89.3%

NHS FORTH VALLEY

89.9%

NHS GRAMPIAN

92.5%

NHS GREATER GLASGOW & CLYDE

86.7%

NHS HIGHLAND

91.8%

NHS LANARKSHIRE

90.1%

NHS LOTHIAN

91.8%

NHS ORKNEY

94.7%

NHS SHETLAND

86.8%

NHS TAYSIDE

80.5%

NHS WESTERN ISLES

87.1%

NHSSCOTLAND 

88.5%

Source: PHS SMR02 Data : Excludes women delivering at home or in non-NHS hospitals ; data is provisional.

Further information

Antenatal Access statistics

Information on The Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation.

Related National Outcomes

 

Page updated: 09 March 2022

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