Background and Introduction
Original Aims
The project's original aims were divided into 2 phases.
- Phase I
The development of the Scottish Birth Record (SBR) and promoting the use of SBR to register newborns on CHI - Phase II
The development of a strategy for bringing together data from other systems (mainly the Child Health Surveillance Systems) and piloting such integration.
The project has evolved in such a way that there has been greater emphasis on the development of the SBR with less emphasis on Phase II.
The Scottish Birth Record (SBR) has replaced the SMR11 reporting scheme and every baby born in Scotland will have one (and only one) SBR. Until 1996 every baby was entered onto the SMR11 scheme, but it was decided that details of healthy babies should reside on SMR02 (maternity) and SMR11 would be reserved for a sick baby or babies with congenital anomalies, however this has not proved successful and there has been confusion over what constitutes a sick baby. There was also an unacceptable level of congenital anomalies reported.
Current Aims of the SBR
- To make all the relevant data concerning a child available to the appropriate health care professional when and where it is needed, and also to the parents and the child, whilst preventing unauthorised access
- To improve clinical communication between professionals
- To promote audit and clinical governance based on accurate data
- To ensure detailed, accurate, and complete timely information is available for planning services, epidemiological surveillance and research
- To develop the use of CHI to uniquely identify newborns
- Link with the Scottish Woman Held Maternity Record (SWHMR) Project
Building on the success of the SBR in capturing details of all births in Scotland we are building connections that allow such data exchange among maternity, neonatal and child health sytems. The SBR developmental strategy will support this aim by developing the SBR as an aggregator/distributor or 'key node' for the exchange of maternity and neonatal data by building on existing XML interfaces. Specifically we will build interfaces that collect maternity/neonatal data from child health/maternity/neonatal systems in Scotland and distribute this data to:
- Screening Services
- National Child Health Systems
- General practitioners and community nursing services through discharge summaries via SCI Gateway
It is also planned to develop SBR as an aggregator source of SMR02 nationally-comparable maternity data fro performance management, quality improvement and public health surveillance/epidemiology.
