There is currently no standardised or specific triage process for pregnant and newly postnatal women who attend Emergency Departments (ED) with concerns or issues. The confidential enquiries into maternal death in the UK have identified this as resulting in delays in the recognition of the severity of illness, delaying treatment/ referral and potentially resulting in adverse outcome.

This project aims to explore the number of pregnant and newly postnatal women who attend UHBs Emergency Department (ED), the reason for their attendance, their gestation or time since birth, how unwell they are (the acuity score such as NEWS2/ SEWs), the time to referral to the obstetric/gynaecology AMU/ General medicine services (if done), and whether the woman was admitted, transferred or discharged.

This quantitative study shall use data from curated by PIONEER Health Data Research Hub who hold de-identified patient electronic health records from University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust. This project will be secondary analysis of their de-identified emergency department data. As this project is secondary analysis of pre-existing data, ethical approval is already in place (REC 20/EM/0158 (East Midlands (Derby) & (CAG) 20/CAG/0084). The data for this project is currently being extracted and we are in the process of obtaining the Data Sharing Agreement between the University of Birmingham and University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust.

Lead: Sara Kenyon, Beck Taylor

Dates: November 2020 – September 2021

Funding: ARC funded