The New Zealand Maternity Clinical Indicators present comparative maternity interventions and outcomes data for pregnant women and their babies by maternity facility and district health board region.
These indicators are the result of collaboration between the Ministry of Health and maternity stakeholders representing consumer, midwifery, obstetric, general practice, paediatric and anaesthetic perspectives. In 2011 an expert working group established a set of 12 maternity clinical indicators that could be measured using the available data collections at that time.
The expert working group has continued to review and revise the maternity clinical indicators since this time. This report presents 21 indicators that reflect care during pregnancy and the postnatal period, severe maternal morbidity and outcomes for babies at birth.
- One applies to women who registered with a lead maternity carer (LMC).
- Eight apply to standard primiparae (definition used to identify a group of women for whom interventions and outcomes should be similar).
- Eight apply to all women giving birth in New Zealand.
- Four apply to all babies born in New Zealand.
This is the sixth report in the New Zealand Maternity Clinical Indicators series, with a focus on women giving birth and babies born in the 2014 calendar year.
As the five previous reports demonstrated, reported maternity service delivery and outcomes for women and babies vary between district health boards (DHBs) and between individual secondary and tertiary facilities. These findings merit further investigation of data quality and integrity as well as variations in local clinical practice management.
Since 2012, DHBs and maternity stakeholders have used national benchmarked data in their local maternity quality and safety programmes to identify areas warranting further investigation at a local level. Using the data in this report, DHBs and local maternity stakeholders can expand the scope of their investigations and view trends over a six-year period.