National Statistical

Over the past year we have been working to publish data faster to support improvements to infant health. In this blog, Dr Claire Sellwood Green reports on the latest step in this process: publishing figures on neonatal deaths every quarter.

We are fortunate that infant mortality in England and Wales is relatively low. However, every one of those deaths is a tragedy, and progress in further reducing them has stalled in recent years. To help change this, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) asked us to produce more timely figures on births, stillbirths, and neonatal mortality (up to 28 days old), to better track any improvements in infant health outcomes and detect possible problems sooner.

Working closely with DHSC colleagues, we published our first ever quarterly births dataset for both England and Wales last year, which included provisional stillbirth rates. Following the success of this first stage, we have been working to produce an equivalent dataset for neonatal deaths. Today, we’ve published the first release.

What are the current trends in neonatal mortality?

In 2017, the government announced an ambition to halve rates of stillbirths and neonatal deaths by 2025.

Since 2010, both stillbirth rates and neonatal mortality were decreasing and by 2020, neonatal mortality had fallen by around a quarter. However, since then progress has stalled, with our latest publication showing both have now plateaued and remain at 2020 levels.

Alongside our figures, there have been multiple reviews and investigations into several NHS Trusts, revealing a range of shortcomings.

Subsequent efforts to tackle these issues include Martha’s Rule, which increases patient monitoring and empowers families and staff to escalate concerns over patient wellbeing via a rapid review by another team.

Monitoring progress

Although significant progress has been made in the identification of issues surrounding neonatal care, it is just as crucial to monitor whether the efforts to tackle them are having an impact.

In 2023, the ONS was approached by the DHSC to request more timely birth, stillbirth, and neonatal mortality data. As it stood, data on these events were published just once a year in annual reports, which meant tracking progress, detecting issues, and reacting to them was slower than desired. We subsequently began publishing the quarterly births and stillbirths dataset for both England and Wales last year.

Today’s equivalent dataset for neonatal deaths includes provisional data from Q1 2025 to Q1 2026, as well as finalised data from 2019 to 2024. Going forward, we will be able to keep publishing updates quarterly alongside our quarterly birth figures. However, the quarterly deaths will be for the quarter six months ago, compared with the three-month lag on the births data. This is because births are typically registered faster than neonatal deaths, as the latter are normally investigated by a coroner, so it takes additional time to build up our dataset.

What does the new data show?

Together, these new datasets will offer more granular information on the health of infants much faster than was previously available. So far, they show the provisional neonatal mortality rate for quarter one of 2026 in England was 2.8 deaths per 1,000 live births, although this is expected to increase as we receive late death registrations. The provisional rate (allowing the same time period to receive registrations) for quarters of 2025 was consistently between 2.6 and 3 deaths per 1,000 live births. The quarterly rates in Wales show more variation but are based on a very small number of deaths.

If you have any questions or comments on this new release, or any of our child health statistics, please contact us at health.data@ons.gov.uk.