Barb Vernon Chief Executive Officer, Women's Healthcare Australasia, barb.vernon@wcha.asn.au
Data for Maternity Excellence: the Australian Maternity Care Registry aims to support continuous improvement in pregnancy, labour and birth care and outcomes for women and newborns through assisting healthcare services to benchmark their performance with peers, identify trends over time, and identify and respond to unwarranted variation.
The registry is hosted by Women’s Healthcare Australasia (WHA), a not for profit national network of more than 150 maternity care hospitals from all jurisdictions. It currently captures up to 83% of annual public births.
Clinical data on pregnancy, labour and birth care for women giving birth in Australia is collected, analysed and provided back to participating services on more than 70 indicators. Dashboards assist participating services to identify trends in care over time, variation from peer services caring for similar women, and whether improvement efforts are having intended effects.
Annual reports provided to participating hospitals are held in high regard. Services review their report to identify areas of strength in their care of women and newborns, and areas that may warrant further attention and/or improvement.
WHA assists participating services to network with peers demonstrating stronger performance on areas they may wish to strengthen or improve. It also facilitates collaborative quality improvement initiatives, whereby teams from multiple services work together at the same time on improving processes and outcomes of care in relation to a given cohort of women or adverse outcome.
The registry is now offering access to a secure online portal for participating hospitals where data is being updated monthly or quarterly, depending on the capacity of the participating hospitals. A growing suite of analytics is being developed to help clinicians understand how to optimise outcomes for different cohorts of women with shared characteristics or who experience a common adverse outcome. Dashboards also support assessment of performance over time against national clinical care standards such as the Safer Baby Bundle related to stillbirth prevention.
Data in the registry has recently been opened to researchers for analysis and peer reviewed publication.
- Feedback to contributing clinicians
- Shared with other clinicians
- Shared with hospital executives
- Reported in annual Benchmarking reports
Nil. We are committed to collecting and reporting on PROMS once a data source becomes readily available.
Nil. We are committed to collecting and reporting on PREMS once a data source becomes readily available.
Australian Capital Territory
- Centenary Hospital for Women and Children
- North Canberra Hospital
New South Wales
- Armadale Health Service
- Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital
- Bowral & District Hospital
- Broken Hill Base Hospital
- Campbelltown Hospital
- Cooma District Hospital
- Fairfield Hospital
- Gosford Hospital
- Goulburn District Hospital
- Hornsby Ku-Ring-Gai Hospital
- Liverpool Hospital
- Moruya District Hospital
- Queanbeyan District Hospital
- Royal Hospital For Women
- Royal North Shore Hospital
- St George Hospital
- South East Regional Hospital Bega
- The Sutherland Hospital
- Westmead Hospital
- Wyong Public Hospital
Northern Territory
- Royal Darwin Hospital
Queensland
- Caboolture Hospital
- Chinchilla Hospital
- Dalby Hospital Health Service
- Gold Coast University Hospital
- Goondiwindi Hospital
- Gympie Hospital
- Kingaroy Hospital & Community Health Centre
- Mater Mother's Hospital
- Redlciffe Hospital
- Royal Brisbane & Womens Hospital
- Stanthorpe Hospital
- Sunshine Coast University Hospital
- Toowoomba Hospice
- Townsville Hospital
- Warwick Hospital
South Australia
- Flinders Medical Centre
- Lyell Mcewin Hospital
- Riverland General Hospital
- Women's & Children's Health Network
- Yorke & Northern LHN, SA
Tasmania
- Launceston General Hospital
- Northwest regional hospital
- Royal Hobart Hospital
Victoria
- Angliss Hospital
- Barwon Health - Geelong Hospital Campus
- Bendigo Health - Bendigo Hospital
- Box Hill Hospital
- Castlemaine Health
- Frankston Hospital
- Latrobe Regional Hospital
- Mercy Hospital For Women
- Portland District Health
- Royal Children's Hospital - Travancore Campus
- Royal Women's Hospital
- Swan Hill District Hospital
- Werribee Mercy Hospital
Western Australia
- Academy Day Hospital
- St John of God Midland Hospital
- WA Country Health Service
- Women's & Newborns Health Service WA
Nil. The registry is currently accessed through logging in to the WHA member’s website and then opening the Data4ME portal. So no public website link is currently available.
WHA has obtained ethics approval for one major study related to this dataset from the HREC at the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital, currently the only NHMRC accredited HREC for Women’s Health research. The approved research project is Project ID: 102817; HREC/2023/MNHB/102817; A quantitative evaluation of the Every Week Counts national program to reduce early and preterm birth in Australia.