Implications for Improving Fetal Death Vital Statistics: Connecting Reporters' Self-Identified Practices and Barriers to Third Trimester Fetal Death Data Quality in New York City

Objectives: Perinatal mortality prevention strategies that target fetal deaths often utilize vital records data sets shown to contain critical quality deficiencies. To understand the causes of deficient data, we linked survey responses of fetal death reporters with facility fetal death data quality indicators.

Methods: In 2011, we surveyed the person most responsible for fetal death reporting at New York City healthcare facilities on their attitudes, barriers, and practices regarding reporting. We compared responses by 2 facility data quality indicators (data completeness and ill-defined cause of fetal death) for third trimester fetal death registrations using Chi squared tests.

Results: Thirty-nine of 50 facilities completed full questionnaires (78 % response rate); responding facilities reported 84 % (n = 11,891) of all 2011 fetal deaths, including 329 third trimester fetal deaths. Facilities citing ≥1 reporting barrier were approximately five times more likely to have incomplete third trimester registrations than facilities citing no substantial barriers (37.5 vs 7.9 %; RR 4.7; 95 % CI [1.6-14.2]). Reported barriers included onerous reporting requirements (n = 10; 26 %) and competing physician priorities (n = 11; 28 %). Facilities citing difficulty involving physicians in reporting were more likely to report fetal deaths with nonspecific cause-of-death information (70.9 vs 56.6 %; RR 1.3; 95 % CI [1.1-1.5]).

Conclusions: Self-reported challenges correlate with completeness and accuracy of reported fetal death data, suggesting that such barriers are likely contributing to low quality data. We identified several improvement opportunities, including in-depth training and reducing the information collected, especially for early fetal deaths (<20 weeks' gestation), the majority of events reported.