Obstetric Anaesthetic Standard

Obstetric Anaesthetic Standard

Each year, more than 700,000 babies are born in hospitals in the UK, and around 60% of these involve input from anaesthetists. Anaesthetists working in maternity services contribute to the multidisciplinary team to plan and provide care particularly to those patients with health conditions and complex needs.

Anaesthetists also administer specialist methods of pain relief in labour such as epidurals, as well as providing anaesthesia for surgical procedures such as caesarean sections.

Despite anaesthetics being used in more than half of all UK hospital births, there is very little national data on the use of anaesthesia in maternity care. Where data is available, it is often inconsistently coded which makes meaningful analysis to identify patterns, trends and opportunities for improvement difficult.

On this page

Current release

Version: V1.1.0
Release date
March 2026
Status
Published – Endorsement phase
Commissioner
Obstetric Anaesthetists’ Association (OAA)
The standard
The standard model
Download file (xlsx)
V1.1.0 Release notes
Links to SNOMED CT codes added to value set column in information model where relevant. 
Supporting documentation
Description/purpose
Value sets
PRSB owned and managed value sets (SNOMED codes) that support the implementation of this information standard.
Visual summary
A visual layout showing the structure of the standard and its contents.
Final report
Describes the purpose, methodolgy and stakeholder engagement for developing the standard, along with the findings and recommendations for further work.
Male And Female Nurse Working At Nurses Station

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About this standard

This standard is intended to complement the Digital Maternity Standard and should be used alongside it.

We were commissioned by the Obstetric Anaesthetists’ Association (OAA) to research and develop an information standard to enable the introduction of a national dataset for anaesthesia in maternity settings.

The standard outlines the minimum dataset needed to improve care and quality outcomes for obstetric anaesthetic services and support evidence-based policy making. Our work builds on the OAA’s National Obstetric Anaesthetic Database (NOAD), which was previously used to audit patterns of practice and complications of anaesthesia, and existing OAA research into key quality indicators identified as being most relevant to obstetric anaesthesia. 

 

Further resources

  • Standards explained
    PRSB’s guide to standards which sets out the purpose and benefits of using standards and how to support frontline professionals to adopt them.
  • IHRIM record correction guidance
    Despite vigilance when filing information in records, mistakes can occur. The Institute of Health Records and Information Management has guidance to support professionals in making corrections following errors.

Endorsement

This standard has been endorsed by the following organisations:

The endorsement phase is ongoing, and additional endorsing organisations will be added to this page as they are confirmed.

CHAT theory also explicitly addresses five areas which if addressed systematically will help overcome stakeholder differences in pursuit of the common goal:

1. Understanding the artefacts that characterise the group and its activity.
• The artefacts might be clinical settings or the forms and templates used to capture and share information. During the pilot we heard about hard copy Dialog response forms; locally generated templates for collating information from different systems; letters and emails to GPs; images, poems or other non-text artefacts that service users might want to include in their ‘about me’ or care plan.

2. Understanding the multi-views of the group. Such groups are always a community of multiple points of view, traditions and interests. 
• Different participants in the group will have different roles and will bring to the group and their roles their own histories, language, and ‘rules’. During our Stocktake preparations and workshops we worked with psychiatrists, mental health nurses, occupational therapists, social workers, transformation leads and voluntary sector representatives, all professions and interests with their own language, approaches professional ‘rules’ but united in their interest in care plans, care planning.

3. Activity systems (like the ICSs) take shape and get transformed over periods of time. ‘Historicity’ is a term coined to express how the group’s problems and potentials can only be understood against their own history. 

 

• ‘We’ve always done it this way’, ‘that didn’t work before’, ‘it’s always like this’, ‘it wasn’t always like this’, ‘they are changing things again’, are all typical statements that often frustrate those charged with overseeing change initiatives. Without addressing the experiences that lie behind such comments you risk repeating mistakes of the past, alienating your stakeholders or just not understanding the real starting point for your transformation project. This is particularly the case for the implementation of the PCSP standard, the success of which will be largely reliant on point-of-care practices and information protocols as well as having systems which are user friendly and appropriately configured.

4. The central role of contradictions as sources of change and development. Contradictions are not the same as problems or conflicts. Contradictions are historically accumulating structural tensions within and between activity systems. Collectively addressing contradictions in how policy, practice, culture and technology interact will empower teams to find genuinely novel solutions for apparently intractable challenges, like interoperability and shared care plan/planning. 

This links to the fifth principle that:

5. the possibility of expansive transformations in activity systems. As the contradictions of an activity system are aggravated, some individual participants begin to question and deviate from its established norms. In some cases, this escalates into collaborative envisioning and a deliberate collective change effort. “An expansive transformation is accomplished when the object and motive of the activity are re-conceptualised to embrace a radically wider horizon of possibilities than in the previous mode of the activity.”