INFANT WEIGHT

Guide For Use
      The weight of all patients less than 365 days of age must be reported to the HMDS, that is either the:


 * 1) First weight recorded after birth for a liveborn newborn during the hospital admission for the birth episode. Note: The birth of stillborn babies is not reported to the HMDS, OR
 * 2) Weight of the baby at admission (where the baby was born elsewhere or born during the mother’s previous admission to hospital).
 * 3) Weight should be recorded for all infants if they are less than 365 days of age and weigh less than or equal to 9000g.

Examples
Example 1:      A 10-day old baby was readmitted for circumcision and his admission weight was 4130 grams. 

Example 2:      A premature baby six months old with a low birth weight was transferred to another hospital to increase weight and condition, and on admission weighed 1820 grams. 

Example 3:      An eleven month old baby was admitted with RSV positive bronchiolitis with an admission weight of 9500 grams. 

*In this case the weight is not reported as the patient’s weight exceeds 9000 grams.





History
Collected from 01/01/1993 although as unqualified newborns cannot be excluded prior to 1996 the number of infants under 1 years is unexpectedly high in 1993 to 1995 with infant weights recorded for each admission:



Missing infant weights:
For birth episodes (Diagnosis = Z38) there are no missing infant weights. There are a substantial missing weights for non-birth episodes:



Recommendations:

 * Infant weight only be released from 01/01/1996 – all data prior to this data should be modified in ‘null’ in the SAS datasets
 * Weights assigned for patient greater than 365 days should be mapped to ‘null’ in SAS data sets
 * Weights of ‘0’ should be mapped to ‘null’ in SAS data sets
 * New edits – for weights > 365 days old and under acceptable rangeWeights for birth episodes are complete and normally distributed – Quality excellent – 10/10
 * Weights for non-birth episodes are very incomplete although quality is improving – Quality poor – 2/10
 * Overall – should be split into birth and non-birth