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.
A web-based tool is available 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.
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