Date Time Analysis of child deaths in England shows importance of care for premature and young babies Actions to reduce the number of babies born before 37 weeks’ gestation and improve their outcomes are among the recommendations made by the University of Bristol National Child Mortality Database (NCMD) team, who carried out national analysis of child deaths in England. This is one of the findings, published today [10 June] in NCMD’s second annual report, which aims to learn lessons from all child deaths in order to reduce the number of children who die in the future. This latest report from Bristol’s NCMD programme, which gathers information on all children who die in England below the age of 18 years, analysed the characteristics of the 3,347 child deaths between 1 April 2019 and 31 March 2020 in England, and found that the majority of children who died (63 per cent) in this period were under one year old. Of these, where gestational age at birth was known, 69 per cent were born preterm (before 37 weeks). In fact, 42 per cent of all child deaths occurred before the children were 28 days old.