BORN Impact

Imagine a job where you’re required to make precise measurements (to the tenth of a millimeter) and if they’re not accurate a pregnant person may be misinformed about their baby’s chance of having Down Syndrome.

Check out this report that summarizes BORN’s Top 5 learnings about the effects of COVID-19 on pregnant individuals and their newborns. Recommendations for future infectious disease outbreaks or pandemics are also included. 

Data from the BORN Information System was recently used to explore temporal trends and determinants of COVID-19 vaccine coverage and series initiation during pregnancy in Ontario from December 2020 to December 2021

Although rare, some newborns who appear healthy at birth have serious, even life-threatening conditions. Newborn screening, a simple blood test administered shortly after birth, evaluates babies for a panel of over 25 treatable diseases.

Prenatal Screening Ontario (PSO) plays a vital role in supporting informed decision-making and improving care for pregnant individuals across the province. By collecting and analyzing data on prenatal screening outcomes, PSO helps healthcare providers and families understand how well screening tests perform and how services can be optimized. This data-driven approach not only enhances clinical practice but also informs policy changes—ensuring that prenatal screening in Ontario remains safe, effective, and responsive to the needs of the population.

This week we're celebrating the sonography profession and the important role sonographers play in providing quality healthcare to Canadians. Sonographers help diagnose disease and injury, monitor health, and guide medical treatment.

Prenatal Screening Ontario (PSO) offers resources and point of care tools to support sonographers in performing high-quality nuchal translucency (NT) and crown-rump length (CRL) measurements. 

Data from the BORN Information System was recently used to investigate the association of COVID-19 vaccination in pregnancy with risk of preterm birth, small for gestational age at birth, and stillbirth.

This study, published in the British Medical Journal, was supported by funding from the Public Health Agency of Canada, through the Vaccine Surveillance Reference Group and the COVID-19 Immunity Task Force.

The loss of a baby after 20 weeks gestation and before birth (called stillbirth) is a devastating pregnancy outcome. Stillbirth can be due to illness, infection, trauma or exposure to toxic substances, abnormalities in the baby, problems with the placenta that supplies the baby with blood flow and nutrition, or problems in the umbilical cord. However, in many cases there is no clear reason found at the time the baby dies.

In the first and second waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, pregnant individuals in Ontario and across Canada had higher rates of hospitalization and intensive care unit (ICU) admission relative to non-pregnant individuals of similar age.