The Maternity Dashboard: how effective is it in improving maternity care?

It is vital to measure and monitor the quality of clinical care, workload, workforce available to deliver care, adverse incidents as well as user feedback (complaints and compliments) to ensure the delivery of patient centred care. Clinical governance refers to a system or framework through which National Health Services (NHS) organizations are accountable for safeguarding and improving the quality of care and services by creating an environment in which clinical excellence will flourish. Various ‘score cards’ such as the ‘Maternity Dashboard’ have been designed to improve patient care and outcomes by benchmarking against regional or national standards and monitoring these different parameters closely on a monthly basis to avoid adverse outcomes. It is now widely accepted that score cards such as the ‘Maternity Dashboard’ are vital and essential to ensure consistent delivery of high standards of care and to help clinicians, managers, local commissioners of the service, trust boards, users of the service and external bodies to appreciate areas of good care as well as to identify areas that require further improvement.