2015 Scottish Maternity Care Survey Technical Report

2 Outputs of the Survey

2.1 This section provides more details of the range of outputs from the survey. In addition to the national report www.gov.scot/stats/bulletins/01190, there are a number of other outputs from the survey. Reports for individual hospitals and Health Boards have been produced where possible and are available at www.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Health/maternitysurvey/2015Results.

Hospital and NHS Board reports

2.2 These reports contain hospital and NHS Board level analyses for all of the questions in the survey. For each question the results have been calculated after removing responses from any women who said that the question did not apply to them, who ticked ‘don’t know/can’t remember’ or who did not answer at all. The results are compared to the Scottish average and to the equivalent figure from the last survey (where possible).

2.3 The first section of the report presents the results of the four overarching questions where women were asked to rate the care that they received overall at each stage of their maternity care, before during and after the birth of their babies.

2.4 The second section of the report presents results for the scored questions for each stage of the maternity care. Results are shown as the percentage of women who answered each question positively. Bar charts show the percentage of patients answering positively as green, and the percentage negatively as red. Where answers are partially positive, the percentage is shown in yellow. More information about the percentage positive and negative analysis is available in Section 8 and Annex A.

2.5 Differences which are significantly^[1] higher or lower than the national average, or the equivalent figures from the last survey, are marked with an “S”.

2.6 An example is shown below. In the example 50% of patients for the Board responded positively, which is 6 percentage points lower than the national average and 2 percentage points lower than the equivalent figure from the previous survey. The “S” symbol shows that this difference is statistically significant.

2.7 The third section presents results for the non-scored questions for each stage of maternity care. These questions are either information questions or multiple choice questions which could not be calculated as per cent positive.

2.8 The final section of the report presents demographic information on women who responded to the survey showing first the hospital or board results followed by the national average.

Availability of data for further research

2.9 The NMAHP-RU will undertake further analysis to provide a report on variations on experiences of maternity care by different groups of women, for example first time mothers, mothers from different socio-economic groups or mothers from rural communities. This will provide further insights into some of the issues highlighted in this report. For example, the national report has identified that women do not always feel that they have been given sufficient advice and support for infant feeding however, it is not yet clear whether this applies more to specific groups such as first time mothers or to mothers who have chosen to breast feed their babies. This secondary analysis will provide information to inform specific areas of need for service improvements.

Comparability with the English Maternity Services Survey

2.10 The Care Quality Commission publish the results of their maternity care surveys for England at www.cqc.org.uk/content/maternity-services-survey-2013.

2.11 Results from the English surveys are partially comparable to the Scottish ones. Both surveys have similar and in many cases identical questions; however the Scottish survey introduced questions that were relevant to Scotland only. Therefore not all questions are comparable. The national results report for the 2013 Scottish survey provides comparisons between the two surveys (English and Scottish in 2013) where possible. The report is available at www.gov.scot/Resource/0044/00442822.pdf.