European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology
The availability of perinatal health indicators in Europe
Section snippets
The availability of perinatal health indicators in Europe
This paper describes the feasibility study undertaken to assess the extent to which the participating countries of Europe were able to provide data to construct the core and recommended indicators defined in the PERISTAT project. It discusses the results of this and relates them to the ways in which data are collected within the countries.
After describing the approach made to participating countries, this paper describes the extent to which they were able to provide the data we requested to
How the indicator data were compiled
In order to collect the aggregated data required to construct the indicators, the members of the Scientific Advisory Committee were first asked to provide information about the routine data collection systems in their countries, including both routine administrative and clinical systems and periodic sample surveys. For each system, the information provided included the name of the statistical, clinical or other organisation running it and the contact details of a person within the organisation
Data collection within participating countries
Information about data collection systems identified by participants and used to contribute data to PERISTAT are summarised in Table 1, Table 2, Table 3, Table 4, Table 5. The systems are summarised and tabulated by country in Appendix A. These do not necessarily cover all relevant data available in each country. In some countries, there may be sources which were not identified or were known but not used. In some cases, requests for data from specific sources may not have been successful,
Availability of data to construct PERISTAT indicators
The extent to which countries were able to provide the data for the proposed indicators is summarised in Fig. 1. A black square for a data item indicates that the data were fully available at a national level. Horizontal stripes indicate that some but not all the data were available and vertical stripes indicate that the data were available either for one or more but not all regions or components of a country or for a sample.
As can be seen, coverage varied widely. The Nordic countries, Ireland
Discussion
The extent to which data could be provided depended firstly on whether the data items needed were recorded within a country. Most of the data items will have been recorded somewhere, on paper even if not on a computer. Other factors played an equally important part in determining whether this information became translated into national statistics. These included where and how the data were recorded locally, whether they found their way into national systems, the quality and coverage of these
Conclusions and recommendations
The work done in the PERISTAT project has been considerable. As well as leading to data which can be compared internationally, it has identified major gaps in the data collected in the participating countries. Like so many projects of this type, it has produced a list of subjects for further work in addition to its own results.
In comparison with other international indicator sets, described in article 1 in this issue, the gaps in the data available to construct the PERISTAT indicators seem
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2009, European Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Reproductive BiologyCitation Excerpt :This in turn requires a complete perinatal mortality registration. The inadequacies in the perinatal mortality registration have been described elsewhere [1]. Apart from the registration problem there is also the lasting discussion on perinatal period definitions; there are marked differences in these definitions in and between countries hampering an adequate comparison of perinatal mortality [2,3].
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2007, European Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Reproductive BiologyCitation Excerpt :Many studies commenting the differences in perinatal mortality over time focused their attention on the impact of prenatal diagnosis [6,9]. Even the PERISTAT project, which involved many countries in Europe, considered 97 indicators to picture the perinatal health in developed countries [10,11] but failed in defining the actual situation, probably due to the multitude of confounding aspects [4]. Moreover, they analysed such a short period (1 year) that it was not possible to measure perinatal health outcomes properly, as they need a longer time frame.