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The CEMACH Programme covers all the work carried out by CMACE in respect of the national confidential enquiry into maternal and child health.
The national enquiry into maternal and child health is itself divided into two sub-programmes:
Maternal and Perinatal Enquiry
The maternal and perinatal enquiry brings together well-established ingoing work as well as national enquiry projects. Its scope includes health outcomes for mothers both during and after pregnancy and babies up to 28 days after delivery. Projects typically take three to four years to complete and are designed to enable in-depth review of issues identified by the ongoing enquiry work. There are currently four strands of work within the maternal and perinatal enquiry:
Child Health Enquiry
The scope of the child health enquiry is health outcomes for children aged from 28 days to 18 years. It is entirely project based. Enquiry work on child health outcomes was started by CEMACH in 2004. The first project was a child death review on child deaths occurring in 2006. It was published as ‘Why Children Die: A pilot study’ in May 2008.
The current study on the child health enquiry is on Head Injury. This project is expected to run from 2009 – 2012.
CMACE is currently engaged on topic selection for the child health enquiry study to follow the Head Injury project. Further details on this topic selection process can be found on the New Child Health Enquiry Topic page.
Funding of the Confidential Enquiry Programme
Most of the funding for the enquiry Programme is provided by the National Patient Safety Agency (NPSA). The NPSA funds this work for England and Wales. Northern Ireland, Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man also participate and fund their share of the full enquiry programme. Scotland, through NHSQIS, participates in the maternal and perinatal enquiry programme and provides funding to cover these elements. Similarly, the Republic of Ireland participates in and provides funding for the maternal death enquiry.
The Conference and Workshop Programme
CMACE carries out a national and regional conference and workshop programme to assist in the dissemination of enquiry findings. Details of current and future events planned as part of this programme can be found on the Conference and Workshops page.
Reports and Peer Review Papers
In addition to the conference and workshop programme CMACE usually produces a number of written outputs for each national enquiry it undertakes. These include reports which published itself and peer review papers published in relevant professional journals. Further details on its written outputs can be obtained from either the publications page of this website or by contacting our central office.
All reports outlined in the programme pages are available to download from our publications page
Data Protection and Ethics
CMACE is committed to maintaining a recognised level of best practice for its information security procedures. The organisations’ Information security procedures were formulated in conjunction with the International Standard ISO/IEC 17799:2000 “Information Technology – Code of Practice for information security management”. CMACE also complies with the recent governmental Information Governance Assurance Programme. All staff apply the highest standards when handling both physical and electronic data formats.
CMACE have approval under Section 251 of the NHS Act 2006 (originally enacted under Section 60 of the Health and Social Care Act 2001) to collect patient identifiable Information for the purpose of national confidential enquiry. Section 251 permits the common law duty of confidentiality to be set aside in specific circumstances for medical purposes and its approval allows NHS organisations to disclosure identifiable patient information to CMACE within the confines of the Data Protection Act. CMACE uses this approval as a last resort and seeks to use non identifiable data for new projects wherever possible.
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