Pātiki and Waharua Kōpito patterns

Maternity Clinical Indicators web tool

A web-based tool is available for you to explore the numbers and rates for 2021 and trends across the full 13-year time series. This includes numbers and rates of each indicator from 2009 to 2021 by ethnic group and DHB of residence, and by facility of birth.

About the Maternity Clinical Indicators web tool

The New Zealand Maternity Clinical Indicators data presents comparative maternity interventions and outcomes data across a set of 20 indicators for pregnant people and their babies by maternity facility and the former District Health Board (DHB) regions.

This is the thirteenth year in the New Zealand Maternity Clinical Indicators series, with a focus on people giving birth and babies born in the 2021 calendar year.

About the indicators

  • One indicator applies to women/people who registered with a lead maternity carer (LMC).
  • Eight indicators apply to standard primiparae (definition used to identify a group of women for whom interventions and outcomes should be similar).
  • Seven indicators apply to all women/people giving birth in New Zealand.
  • Four apply to all babies born in New Zealand.

2021 data summary

Data demonstrates that reported maternity service delivery and outcomes for people and babies vary between DHBs - as they were in 2021 - 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 programs to identify areas warranting further investigation.

To support further investigation, Te Whatu Ora provides unit record clinical indicators data to district maternity quality and safety programme coordinators.

Using the web tool

Maternity data clinical coding changes

From 1 July 2019, diagnoses codes are assigned using the 11th edition of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision, Australian Modification, and procedure codes are assigned using the 11th Edition of the Australian Classification of Health Interventions.

Some maternity events (women/people giving birth in hospital and live babies born in hospital) are impacted by changes in the 11th Edition clinical coding standards, particularly place of birth and type of birth data.

Therefore, this data may show variation due to the change in coding standards rather than a true increase.

Further information about these coding changes can be found in the web tool and the maternity clinical indicators background documents.

Disclaimer

In this web tool, maternity data was extracted and recalculated for the years 2007–2021 to reflect ongoing updates to data in the National Maternity Collection and the revision of population estimates and projections following each census.

For this reason, there may be small changes to some numbers and rates from those presented in previous publications and tables.

We have quality checked the collection, extraction, and reporting of the data presented here.

However, errors can occur. Contact us if you have any concerns regarding any of the data or analyses presented here, at data-enquiries@health.govt.nz

Publishing information

Date of publication:
17 August 2023
Ordering information: Only soft copy available to download
Copyright status: Owned by Te Whatu Ora and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence

Data series 2009-2018

The Ministry of Health has previously published reports of maternity clinical indicators, as well as trend graphs and summary tables. These can also be accessed through the web tool and downloaded there.

New Zealand Maternity Clinical Indicators 2014-2018

New Zealand Maternity Clinical Indicators 2009-2013