Source: New Zealand Ministry of Health
The New Zealand Maternity Clinical Indicators present comparative maternity interventions and outcomes data across a set of 20 indicators for pregnant women and their babies by maternity facility and district health board region.
- One indicator applies to women 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 giving birth in New Zealand.
- Four apply to all babies born in New Zealand.
This is the eleventh year in the New Zealand Maternity Clinical Indicators series, with a focus on women giving birth and babies born in the 2019 calendar year.
As the previous years’ data 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 programs to identify areas warranting further investigation. To support further investigation, the Ministry of Health provides unit record clinical indicators data to DHB maternity quality and safety programme coordinators.
Access the data
A web-based tool is available for you to explore the numbers and rates for 2019 and trends across the full 11-year time series. This includes numbers and rates of each indicator from 2009 to 2019 by ethnic group and DHB of residence, and by facility of birth.
The same data is also available as an Excel file: Trends: graphs and summary tables (Excel, 3.6 MB)
The Ministry of Health is no longer producing the New Zealand Maternity Clinical Indicators Report. The web-based tool provides the full indicators dataset as tables and figures.
Background, methodology and metadata are available in the following guide:
Maternity data clinical coding changes
From 1 July 2019, diagnoses codes are assigned using the 11th Edition of ICD-10-AM (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, Tenth Revision, Australian Modification) and procedure codes are assigned using the 11th Edition of ACHI (Australian Classification of Health Interventions) (Source: The Independent Hospital Pricing Authority).
Some maternity events (women 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 Report on Maternity: further information document.
Disclaimer
In this web tool, maternity data was extracted and recalculated for the years 2007–2019 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 the Ministry of Health if you have any concerns regarding any of the data or analyses presented here, at [email protected]
