Maternity Services Data Set (MSDS) - Version 1.5#
Last modified: 12 Oct 2026
1. Summary#
MSDS includes demographic and clinical information for each mother and their baby. Among these are appointment dates, diagnoses, delivery details, birthweight, and hospital episodes. Version 1.5 of MSDS is a single table with each row containing all available information about a mother and baby’s receipt of maternity services.
| Dataset Descriptor | Dataset-specific Information |
|---|---|
| Name of Dataset in TRE | NHSE_MSDS_v1_5 |
| Citation (APA) | Data Services, NHS England (NHSE). (2025). NHS England: Maternity Services Data Set (MSDS) - Version 1.5. UK Longitudinal Linkage Collaboration (UK LLC). https://doi.org/10.71760/ukllc-dataset-00678-04 |
| Download Citation | Citeproc JSON BibTeX RIS |
| Series | NHS England |
| Owner | NHS England |
| Copyright | Copyright © (2026), NHS England. Data re-used with the permission of NHS England. All rights reserved. |
| Temporal Coverage in the TRE | 05/2015 - 03/2019 |
| Geographical Coverage | England |
| Participant Count | 6183 |
| Number of Variables | 126 |
| Number of Observations | 6470 |
| Key Link | https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/data-collections-and-data-sets/data-sets/maternity-services-data-set/guidance/general-msds-guidance |
| Keywords | pregnancy,maternity,labour and delivery |
| Latest Extract Date | 2024-04-26 |
| Specific Restrictions to Data Use | None |
| Build a Data Request | https://explore.ukllc.ac.uk/ |
2. Metrics#
Click on the plus sign to see the number of participants represented in each dataset.
Table 2: Participants from each LPS represented in the MSDS_v1_5 dataset in the UK LLC TRE. Note: Individual cohort counts of less than 10 are suppressed to <10 and excluded from total participant counts for datasets.
3. Version History#
| Version |
|---|
| Version Date |
| Number of Variables |
| Number of Observations |
| DOI |
| Change Log |
4. Documentation#
We are currently building a documentation storage system which will host useful documents related to datasets and data owners. We will surface these documents on Guidebook.
5. Useful Syntax#
Below we will include syntax that may be helpful to other researchers in the UK LLC TRE. For longer scripts, we will include a snippet of the code plus a link to the UK LLC GitHub repository where you can find the full scripts.