About this project
Why a UK obstetrician built a maternity comparison tool for patients
The gap this fills
The data already exists. MBRRACE-UK (the national programme that investigates pregnancy-related deaths) publishes stillbirth and neonatal death rates by trust. The NMPA (National Maternity and Perinatal Audit) publishes C-section rates, induction rates, and midwife-to-birth ratios for every unit. The CQC (Care Quality Commission, England's healthcare regulator) inspects every maternity unit and publishes detailed reports. NHS England publishes monthly patient satisfaction data.
But all of it is scattered across PDFs, spreadsheets and interactive dashboards designed for clinicians and commissioners - not for a woman at 28 weeks trying to decide where to give birth.
Professional comparison tools do exist - the NMPA Online tool and the NHS Maternity Services Dashboard both let you benchmark one trust against another. But they require clinical literacy to interpret, and they're not designed to be used on a phone by someone who's just been told they're pregnant.
Why I built this
I'm a UK obstetrician. In my clinical practice I see the consequences of informed and uninformed birth planning decisions every day. I also see how much effort it takes - even for a clinician - to pull together the data needed to give a patient a complete picture of their options.
Women in the UK have a legal right to choose where they give birth. But exercising that right meaningfully requires information - and that information has been practically inaccessible to the people who need it most.
This site is my attempt to fix that. Not to rank hospitals, not to alarm anyone, and not to substitute for the clinical conversation that every pregnant woman deserves with her midwife or obstetrician. Just to put the data in one place, in language that doesn't require a medical degree to understand.
Principles
- →No rankings.A high C-section rate doesn't make a unit bad. A low one doesn't make it good. Every metric appears alongside its national average and an explanation of what drives it up or down.
- →Source everything. Every number links directly to its original publication - NHS England, CQC, NMPA, MBRRACE-UK. If you want to verify it, you can.
- →Plain language without dumbing down. Clinical concepts are explained in plain English without being sanitised into meaninglessness.
- →Accuracy above all. If a figure is wrong or outdated, tell us and we will correct it.
A note on data currency and completeness
This site does not receive a live data feed. Every figure shown comes from national datasets published annually by NHS England, NMPA, MBRRACE-UK and the CQC. By the time data is collected, validated, de-identified and released, it typically reflects activity from 12–24 months earlier. The numbers you see represent a unit's recorded performance over a past reporting period.
The data is also only as accurate as what is submitted. NHS trusts that contribute fully and on time to national audits will have richer, more up-to-date profiles here. Those that submit late, partially, or not at all will appear to have gaps - which itself carries information about a unit's engagement with national quality improvement processes.
If you work in a maternity unit and your data looks incomplete: the most direct route to a better profile on this site is to improve your submissions to NHS England Maternity Statistics, the NMPA, and MBRRACE-UK. When those datasets are next published, this site will reflect them.
What's next
The current version covers NHS maternity units across England with clinical outcomes, patient experience data, and facility information. This is the foundation.
Coming next: postcode-based unit search, side-by-side unit comparison, verified post-birth patient reviews, and expansion to Wales and Scotland. If you're a journalist, researcher, or NHS commissioner interested in the data, get in touch.