European Perinatal Health Report. Core indicators of the health and care of pregnant women and babies in Europe in 2015

The health of newborn babies and their mothers are key indicators of the health and wellbeing of populations. Although stillbirth and infant mortality rates have fallen substantially in recent decades, there are still major challenges to achieving the goal of providing an optimal start in life for all children and families. Looking at the health of newborn babies and their mothers through a European lens gives us insight into these challenges and possible ways of tackling them. One of the obstacles to making comparisons between European countries is that they collect their national statistics in different ways, so it is difficult to do valid comparisons.
The European Perinatal Health Report is the fourth report produced by the Euro-Peristat collaboration, which was established to deal with this problem. To produce the report, over 100 participating members in all the current EU member states and Iceland, Norway and Switzerland contributed data from their national statistical systems. Euro-Peristat is coordinated by Inserm, the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research.
Euro-Peristat has defined a set of 10 core and 20 recommended indicators and uses them to monitor perinatal health in Europe. This new report is based on data for over five million births in the year 2015 compiled from public national statistical systems to construct all 10 core indicators and two of the 20 recommended indicators. Euro-Peristat works to produce high quality, comparable indicators by using common inclusion criteria and categories, followed by extensive data checking with the active involvement of network members from all participating countries. Comparisons were made with data for births in 2010 from Euro-Peristat’s previous report.