DAPB3066 Digital Maternity Record Standard

NHS England commissioned the Professional Record Standards Body (PRSB) to consult and engage with a full cross-section of stakeholders, including health and care professionals, patients and service users and system suppliers, to create the digital maternity record standard (DMRS) release 2.  This standard relates to direct patient care, describing the optimal data structure and format of a maternity record.

This new release of the DMRS provides for local implementation of this maternity record within maternity services and supplier systems to enable consistency of information across maternity providers. This will ensure that both health and care professionals and maternity service users have the necessary information in the right place at the right time, to improve the quality and safety of maternity care.  The standard will also support maternity service users by enabling more personalised care, as well as helping midwives and clinicians to provide holistic care. 

The original DMRS release 1 was published by NHS England in 2019.  Since the time of publication of the original standard, new models of care have been developed in relation to:

1.       Personalised Care and Support Plan for maternity

2.       Informed consent tool

3.       Equality & Diversity maternity policy

4.       Midwifery continuity of carer

5.       Maternal medicine

6.       Fetal Medicine

7.       Perinatal pelvic floor health

8.       Smoking cessation

9.       MEWS/NEWTT-2

10.      Post natal GP

11.      Perinatal mental health

DMRS release 2 was developed to incorporate the new models of care and support improvements to patient safety, clinical efficiency and patient experience.

This information standard is published under section 250 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012. An Information Standards Notice (see below) provides an overview of scope and implementation timescales, and the other listed documents provide further detail for those who need to implement the information standard.