Pregnancy, prison and perinatal outcomes in New South Wales, Australia: a retrospective cohort study using linked health data

Walker, Jane; Hilder, Lisa; Lévy, Michaël; Sullivan, Elizabeth A.

doi:10.1186/1471-2393-14-214

Cited by 34 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…While we were unable to calculate rates for women imprisoned during pregnancy separately, the international literature on the birth outcomes of women imprisoned during pregnancy has found improved birth outcomes, including birth weight, for women imprisoned during pregnancy compared to women imprisoned at other times and worse birth outcomes compared to women who are never imprisoned (Knight, & Plugge, 2005 ). However, these findings were not replicated by the only Australian study to date by Walker, Hilder, Levy, and Sullivan ( 2014 ), which found similarly poor birth outcomes for women imprisoned while pregnant compared to women imprisoned at other times. The authors questioned whether this was in part due to the shorter imprisonment terms within the New South Wales female prison population compared to those in the United States (Walker et al, 2014 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

Maternal incarceration, child protection, and infant mortality: a descriptive study of infant children of women prisoners in Western Australia

et al. 2018

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BackgroundThere are no population statistics collected on a routine basis on the children of prisoners in Australia. Accordingly, their potential vulnerability to adverse outcomes remains unclear. This study draws on linked administrative data to describe the exposure of children aged less than 2 years to maternal imprisonment in Western Australia, their contact with child protection services, and infant mortality rates.ResultsIn Western Australia, 36.5 per 1000 Indigenous (n = 804) and 1.3 per 1000 non-Indigenous (n = 395) children born between 2001 and 2011 had mothers imprisoned after birth to age 2 years. One-third of infants’ mothers had multiple imprisonments (maximum of 11). Nearly half (46%) of prison stays were for ≤2 weeks, 12% were between 2 and 4 weeks, 14% were for 1–3 months, and 28% were longer than three months. Additionally, 17.4 per 1000 Indigenous (n = 383) and 0.5 per 1000 non-Indigenous (n = 150) children had mothers imprisoned during pregnancy. Half of the children with a history of maternal incarceration in pregnancy to age 2 years came into contact with child protection services by their second birthday, with 31% of Indigenous and 35% of non-Indigenous children entering out-of-home care. Rates of placement in care were significantly higher for Indigenous children (Relative Risk (RR) 27.30; 95%CI 19.19 to 38.84; p < .001) and for non-Indigenous children (RR 110.10; 95%CI 61.70 to 196.49; p < .001) with a history of maternal imprisonment compared to children of mothers with no corrections record. Infant mortality for children whose mothers were imprisoned up to 5 years before birth or within their first year after birth was higher than for children of mothers with no corrections record for both Indigenous (RR 2.36; 95%CI 1.41 to 3.95; p = .001) and non-Indigenous children (RR 2.28; 95%CI 0.75 to 6.97; p = .147).ConclusionsThis study highlights the particular vulnerability of children whose mothers have been incarcerated and the importance of considering their needs within corrective services policies and procedures. Prison may present an opportunity to identify and work with vulnerable families to help improve outcomes for children as well as mothers.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 76%

Maternal incarceration, child protection, and infant mortality: a descriptive study of infant children of women prisoners in Western Australia

et al. 2018

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“…The MAGIC study produced the first population data from Australia to enable study of the effect of incarceration on pregnancy outcomes [ 1 ]. Studies that seek to assess the effect of prison on pregnancy among incarcerated women are relatively sparse because of the difficulties in case finding, the challenges of selecting appropriate comparison groups and the extensive data required to control for socio-economic confounders [ 2 ].…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Mothers and Gestation in Custody (MAGIC) cohort study was set up to assess incarceration effects on pregnancy outcomes [ 1 ]. The study used linked records to identify women pregnant while in prison and overcome the lack of pregnancy outcome data for prisoners in the state of New South Wales (NSW), Australia.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preparing linked population data for research: cohort study of prisoner perinatal health outcomes

Hilder

Walker

Lévy

et al. 2016

BMC Med Res Methodol

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BackgroundA study of pregnancy outcomes related to pregnancy in prison in New South Wales, Australia, designed a two stage linkage to add maternal history of incarceration and serious mental health morbidity, neonatal hospital admission and infant congenital anomaly diagnosis to birth data. Linkage was performed by a dedicated state-wide data linkage authority. This paper describes use of the linked data to determine pregnancy prison exposure pregnancy for a representative population of mothers.MethodsResearchers assessed the quality of linked records; resolved multiple-matched identities; transformed event-based incarceration records into person-based prisoner records and birth records into maternity records. Inconsistent or incomplete records were censored. Interrogation of the temporal relationships of all incarceration periods from the prisoner record with pregnancies from birth records identified prisoner maternities. Interrogation of maternities for each mother distinguished prisoner mothers who were incarcerated during pregnancy, from prisoner control mothers with pregnancies wholly in the community and a subset of prisoner mothers with maternities both types of maternity. Standard descriptive statistics are used to provide population prevalence of exposures and compare data quality across study populations stratified by mental health morbidity.ResultsWomen incarcerated between 1998 and 2006 accounted for less than 1 % of the 404,000 women who gave birth in NSW between 2000 and 2006, while women with serious mental health morbidity accounted for 7 % overall and 68 % of prisoners. Rates of false positive linkage were within the predicted limits set by the linkage authority for non-prisoners, but were tenfold higher among prisoners (RR 9.9; 95%CI 8.2, 11.9) and twice as high for women with serious mental health morbidity (RR 2.2; 95%CI 1.9, 2.6). This case series of 597 maternities for 558 prisoners pregnant while in prison (of whom 128 gave birth in prison); and 2,031 contemporaneous prisoner control mothers is one of the largest available.ConclusionsRecord linkage, properly applied, offers the opportunity to extend knowledge about vulnerable populations not amenable to standard ascertainment. Dedicated linkage authorities now provide linked data for research. The data are not research ready. Perinatal exposures are time-critical and require expert processing to prepare the data for research.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12874-016-0174-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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“…Particularly on maternal and infant health, where administrative linked data can increase the availability of information on maternal health, social, and economic trajectories before and during pregnancy 3 . The use of linked high-quality administrative datasets provides a unique opportunity to examine factors that might result in long-term and rare child and maternal outcomes over time, with the additional advantage of using large samples, little loss to follow-up, high level of external validity and a great deal of applicability for policymaking [4][5][6] .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Examining the quality of record linkage process using nationwide Brazilian administrative databases to build a large birth cohort

Almeida

Gorender

Ichihara

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Introduction Research using linked routine population-based data collected for non-research purposes has increased in recent years because they are a rich and detailed source of information. The objective of this study is to present an approach to prepare and link data from administrative sources in a middle-income country, to estimate its accuracy and to identify potential sources of bias by comparing linked and no-linked case. Methods We linked two administrative datasets with data covering the period 2001 to 2015, using maternal attributes (maternal name, age, date of birth, and municipally of residence) from Brazil: live birth information system and the baseline of the 100 Million Brazilian Cohort (created using administrative records from over 114 million individuals whose families applied for social assistance via the National Register for Social Programmes) implementing an in house developed linkage tool CIDACS-RL. We then estimated the accuracy of the linkage and examined the characteristics of missed-matches to identify any potential source of bias. Results A total of 27,699,891 live births were recorded of those, 16,447,414 (59.4%) were linked with SINASC. The sensitivity of the linkage ranged from 39.3% in 2001 to 82.1% in 2014. A substantial improvement in the linkage sensitivity after the introduction of maternal date of birth attribute, in 2011, was observed. Our analyses indicated a slightly higher proportion of missing data among missed matches and a higher proportion of people living in an urban area and self-declared as Caucasian among linked pairs when compared with non-linked sets. Discussion We demonstrated that CIDACS-RL is capable of performing high quality and accurate linkage even with a limited number of common attributes, using indexation as a blocking strategy in large routine databases from a middle-income country. However, residual records occurred more among people under worse living conditions. The results presented in this study reinforce the need of evaluating linkage quality and when necessary to take linkage error into account for the analyses of any generated dataset.

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Pregnancy, prison and perinatal outcomes in New South Wales, Australia: a retrospective cohort study using linked health data

Cited by 34 publications

References 7 publications

Maternal incarceration, child protection, and infant mortality: a descriptive study of infant children of women prisoners in Western Australia

Maternal incarceration, child protection, and infant mortality: a descriptive study of infant children of women prisoners in Western Australia

Preparing linked population data for research: cohort study of prisoner perinatal health outcomes

Examining the quality of record linkage process using nationwide Brazilian administrative databases to build a large birth cohort

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