The COVID-19 Health Inequalities Monitoring in England (CHIME) tool brings together data relating to the direct impacts of coronavirus (COVID-19) on factors such as mortality rates, hospital admissions, confirmed cases and vaccinations.

By presenting inequality breakdowns - including by age, sex, ethnic group, level of deprivation and region - the tool provides a single point of access to:

• show how inequalities have changed during the course of the pandemic and what the current cumulative picture is
• bring together data in one tool to enable users to access and use the intelligence more easily
• provide indicators with a consistent methodology across different data sets to facilitate understanding
• support users to identify and address inequalities within their areas, and identify priority areas for recovery

In the March 2023 update, data has been updated for deaths, hospital admissions and vaccinations. Data on inequalities in vaccination uptake within upper tier local authorities has been added to the tool for the first time. This replaces data for lower tier local authorities, published in December 2022, allowing the reporting of a wider range of inequality breakdowns within these areas.

Please send any questions or comments to PHA-OHID@dhsc.gov.uk

This statistical release makes available the most recent monthly data on NHS-funded maternity services in England, using data submitted to the Maternity Services Data Set (MSDS). This is the latest report from the newest version of the data set, MSDS.v.2, which has been in place since April 2019. The new data set was a significant change which added support for key policy initiatives such as continuity of carer, as well as increased flexibility through the introduction of new clinical coding. This was a major change, so data quality and coverage has initially reduced from the levels seen in previous publications. The data derived from SNOMED codes is being used in some measures such as those for smoking at booking and birth weight, and others will follow in later publications. SNOMED data is also included in some of the published Clinical Quality Improvement Metrics (CQIMs), where rules have been applied to ensure measure rates are calculated only where data quality is high enough. System suppliers are at different stages of developing their new solution and delivering that to trusts. In some cases, this has limited the aspects of data that could be submitted to NHS Digital. For the first time, last month we produced a measure counting the percentage of babies fully or partially breastfed between 6 and 8 weeks old. This measure has been incorporated into the Clinical Quality Improvement Metrics (CQIMs) and can be found in the Measures file available for download, and information on its construction can be found in the accompanying Metadata file. Due to variations in data quality and completeness these statistics may not accurately reflect the true number of babies breastfeeding between 6 and 8 weeks old, at this early stage of measure development. The official statistics for breastfeeding prevalence at 6 to 8 weeks after birth are produced quarterly and annually by the Office of Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/child-and-maternal-health-statistics#breastfeeding-statistics. The new experimental NHS Digital CQIMBreastfeeding6to8weeks measure aims to begin to produce a comparable and more powerful statistic to that currently published by OHID. More detail can be found in the ‘Coherence and Comparability’ section of this publication’s Data Quality Statement. To help Trusts understand to what extent they meet the Clinical Negligence Scheme for Trusts (CNST) Data Quality Criteria for Safety Action 2, until the publication of July 2022 data we are producing two data files each month which contain information for data providers showing their performance against all MSDS-derived Safety Action 2 criteria. These are available for download alongside the main publication documents below. These statistics are classified as experimental and should be used with caution. Experimental statistics are new official statistics undergoing evaluation. More information about experimental statistics can be found on the UK Statistics Authority website.