 Data captured around new births A collaborative effort between maternity teams from Welsh health boards, Public Health Wales, and the NHS Wales Information Services team has led to a new way of capturing and interpreting data that monitors the performance of maternity services in Wales. The captured data can now be used to provide a nationwide picture of mothers' weight management, smoking and alcohol intake collected both during pregnancy and at delivery, and infant feeding information following birth. The numbers of healthy births and caesareans are also included. The aim is to use the new data to improve maternity services and the health of mothers and newborns. The data is collected from various dedicated maternity IT systems including a maternity module in the Myrddin Patient Administration System - now used in four Welsh health boards including Betsi Cadwaladr and Powys who have recently adopted it. "There was a lot of joint working throughout the process," says NHS Wales Data Quality Specialist Gareth Griffiths. "Because the processes and systems varied from health board to health board, we had to use the boards' local knowledge to interpret the data and Public Health Wales worked with them to process extracts into a usable format. Then we used our knowledge of the national standards to apply to the final analysis." A method was also established to report infant feeding information using data collected through the NHS Wales-developed Child Health System. | 
