Miscarriages and stillborn births (FOI)

​Request

Please can you tell me over the past 10 years, 5 yrs and 1 year:

A

The number of recorded miscarriages over 24 weeks?

B

The number of stillborn babies after 36 weeks of pregnancy?

Response

A 

This question cannot be answered in the current format as the States of Jersey Health and Social Services follows the World Health Organisation (WHO) definition of stillborn. 

This is babies born after 24 or more weeks completed gestation that did not, at any time, breathe or show signs of life. 

All births after 24 weeks gestation are recorded as stillbirths and not miscarriages.

B

As above: all babies born after 24 weeks or more of completed gestation that did not, at any time breathe or show signs of life are recorded as stillbirths.

To revise the reported information to fit the 36 week period as requested is not possible as it would require more than 12.5 hours of staff time and is therefore refused under the cost limit specified in regulations. 

However, statistics based on the WHO definition are available for the past 10 years and have been published in a previous Freedom of Information (FOI) response and in regularly published Health Profiles. 

Links are provided below. 

Stillbirth figures (FOI)

Health profiles in Jersey

Exemptions and/or refusals applied to this request:

Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014 allows an authority to refuse a request for information where the estimated cost of dealing with the request would exceed the specified amount of the cost limit of £500. This is the estimated cost of one person spending 12.5 working hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.

Article 23 Information accessible to applicant by other means 

(1) Information is absolutely exempt information if it is reasonably available to the applicant, otherwise than under this Law, whether or not free of charge. 

(2) A scheduled public authority that refuses an application for information on this ground must make reasonable efforts to inform the applicant where the applicant may obtain the information.