Sands work with MBRRACE-UK

Sands is a member of the MBRRACE-UK (Mothers and Babies: Reducing Risk through Audit and Confidential Enquiries) collaboration. MBRRACE-UK is a national audit programme and is commissioned by all UK governments to collect information about all late fetal losses, stillbirths, neonatal deaths and maternal deaths across the UK. The programme tracks information about where and why babies and mothers die every year. It takes around 18 months after the end of the year for MBRRACE to collect and analyse all information on deaths in a particular year. This means that its latest report for baby deaths in 2020 was published on 13th October 2022. You can read a summary of the report or access the full report. The perinatal mortality data within this report has also been visualised using an interactive map of the UK which you can explore here.

Sands’ role

  • We contribute the perspective of women and families in all aspect of MBRRACE-UK's work
  • We put forward ideas for which baby deaths we think need further investigation. These are done by MBRRACE-UK panels of experts in a confidential enquiry process. The UK is famous for its confidential enquiries into maternal deaths which has had an exponential impact on improving care and saving lives over several decades. Enquiries into baby deaths aim to do the same thing, by analysing in detail certain deaths to see whether care followed guidelines and how we need to improve care for future women and babies.  
  • We help define standards for bereavement care which are used by confidential enquiry panels, so that the quality of care women and families receive can be measured against Sands most up to date, best practice recommendations. This is important because poor care after your baby has died can impact womens' psychosocial wellbeing as well as their future fertility.
  • We contribute to the writing of the plain English and infographic versions of MBRRACE-UK reports, so that can be read by parents, families, the media and the general public
  • We provide our own short, easy-to-read summaries of MBRRACE-UK reports and put the work in context with other initiatives to reduce baby deaths in the UK, so anyone can see how the work sits in the bigger picture of understanding where care could be improved and deaths potentially prevented. See below.

MBRRACE-UK Perinatal Mortality Surveillance Report 2020.