The role of clinical dashboards in improving patient care: experience with the 'Maternity Dashboard'.

The ‘Maternity Dashboard’ is a clinical performance and governance score card which enables monitoring of various pre-selected parameters at a regular (monthly) interval. Local, regional or national goals or benchmarks are used to compare the current performance against expected standards. This would help not only to identify and promote areas of good clinical practice to safeguard patient care in maternity service, but also may help detect and rectify areas that need improvement. Rarely, the Maternity Dashboard may help identify unsafe clinical practice. A good practice series on the Maternity Dashboard has been produced by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) and this was subsequently recommended by the Chief Medical Officer in the UK [1, 2].