The age, number of previous pregnancies, form of contraception and gestation of women who access abortion services in Irish hospitals is to be collected by the Health Service Executive (HSE) for the first time.
The National Women and Infants Health Programme (NWIHP) is running a pilot system designed to collect more information about termination-of-pregnancy health services in Irish maternity hospitals.
Though the data system is only running in a number of maternity units, there are plans within the HSE to make it national.
While it will mainly collect information about abortions carried out in hospital settings rather than from pills provided by a GP, the HSE will also start collecting details of women who present to hospital after taking abortion pills at home or accessing a termination abroad.
RM Block
Until now, the only national data collected about abortion each year was the total number of terminations carried out under each section of the law, the month that it was carried out and the county or country of residence of the woman accessing the health service.
This data was required to be reported to the Minister for Health under legislation introduced in 2018, following the repeal of the Eighth Amendment.
The HSE said that “until recently, there was no formal or systematic national mechanism for monitoring and evaluating [termination of pregnancy] services”.
It said the NWIHP has developed “a national electronic data collection system”.
The system is focusing on collecting data from hospital-based abortion services, which make up a minority of terminations carried out in Ireland every year.
The most recent data available from the Department of Health said that the number of women who had abortions in Ireland rose to 10,852 last year. The overwhelming majority, 10,711, were early pregnancy terminations, where a woman takes two types of medicines prescribed by a GP up to 12 weeks of pregnancy.
The HSE said that its new data system will collect more detail about abortions provided in hospital settings.
It will include the number of abortions carried out in hospitals and the section of the law under which each abortion was carried out. This will include early pregnancy abortion, a termination in a case where there is a risk to a woman’s life or health, a termination carried out in instances where there is a risk to the woman’s life or health in an emergency, or following the diagnosis of a condition likely to lead to death of a foetus.
The HSE will collect data on whether a hospital-based abortion was medical, surgical or surgical under general anaesthetic, as well as how far along in the pregnancy the woman was at the time of the abortion.
Post-abortion complications and the care provided to women in those instances will also be collected for the first time, as will any presentations to hospital of women following an early medical abortion pill or a termination carried out abroad.
The HSE said that “some maternal characteristics” will also be included in data collected, including “age, previous pregnancies and contraception use”.
The HSE said it was “important to note that the system does not collect any patient-identifiable information and does not capture the personal reasons or circumstances behind an individual’s decision to end a pregnancy”.
Under Irish law, there is no requirement for a woman to disclose her reason for choosing an abortion up to 12 weeks – the gestational limit under which the vast majority of abortions happen in Ireland.
