Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.
Birth Registration and Maternity Hospital Episode Data, 2001-2003: The health questions included in the main MCS covered topics such as the mother's health during pregnancy, birth and delivery, and the baby's health immediately after birth. However, the time constraints on the MCS interview limited the number of health-related questions included in the questionnaire. Furthermore, mothers may not have been able to recall accurately some of the information on pregnancy and delivery when the nine-month interview was conducted. Mothers responding to the nine-month interview were therefore asked to give written consent to the following records being added to the survey:birth registration records, containing personal and demographic information about baby and parents at birth registrationcentrally collected hospital records: these data contain information about the mother's stay in hospital, including details of any operations performed or any diagnoses that were made during the hospital stay and the length of stay in hospitalCoded hospital of birth data are also included in the dataset (see file hospanon_ns). The corresponding uncoded hospital of birth data are held under SN 5724, but users should note that they are subject to stringent Special Licence Access conditions. For further information on data coverage and record linkage, see documentation. For the third edition of the study (March 2008), a new version of the data file was deposited, with the family serial number variable (famsrno) replaced by a new serial number variable, mcsid (MCS Research Serial Number). The documentation remains unchanged. For a full edition history, see the study READ file (link below).
Main Topics:
The data comprise nine files, four covering birth registrations for MCS respondents in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, four covering maternity hospital episodes for the same countries and respondents, and one covering coded hospital of birth data. Data coverage may vary between the countries; see documentation for further details.
No sampling (total universe)
Compilation or synthesis of existing material
