Categorising neonatal transports

The UK is now covered by separately commissioned neonatal transport services. This has required significant investment and it is essential that meaningful comparisons of activity levels, outcomes and value for money be made. The UK Neonatal Transport Interest Group devised a dataset in 2005 to compare transport teams. The major problem encountered was defining mutually exclusive categories of transfer. The terms ‘planned’ and ‘unplanned’ were agreed, with ‘time-critical’ added following publication of the Neonatal Toolkit.1 Unplanned/time-critical transfers are subject to scrutiny as part of the Neonatal Quality Standards.2 There is a wide …