Abstract:
Clinical risk factors in pregnancy and labour can often appear universal: everyone knows that preeclampsia, advanced maternal age and gestational diabetes all put mothers and their babies “at higher risk”. But how much higher is the risk, exactly? And how have these risks changed over time, given that the demographics of women giving birth have changed, and so has clinical care?
At Oxford Labour Monitoring, we curate a database of ~225,000 comprehensive labour records across the John Radcliffe Hospital (Oxford), the Rosie Hospital (Cambridge), and St George’s Hospital (London), spanning 1993-2022. In this talk I will discuss how maternity data has changed over the past thirty years, how we think about data curation and integration, and what the implications are on the development of clinical risk-assessment tools.