Maternal morbidity
Severe acute maternal morbidity (SAMM) indicators allow hospitals to monitor and implement safety and quality improvement strategies relating to incidents that occur during pregnancy, labour, birth and postpartum.
What are SAMM events?
Severe acute maternal morbidity (SAMM) events refer to health-impacting and life-threatening incidents that happen during hospitalisation for childbirth.
These events can include severe pre-eclampsia, postpartum haemorrhages and sepsis, and can result in significant short or long term health consequences.
How we are supporting hospitals to monitor SAMM events
Our SAMM indicators allow hospitals to monitor and implement safety and quality improvement strategies related to severe maternal incidents.
They provide clinical definitions and code combinations to consistently flag high priority SAMM events.
The code combinations were also added as an additional mechanism to identify SAMM events using routinely collected data.
Our hospital-acquired complications (HACs) list also includes an indicator to identify third- and fourth-degree perineal laceration during delivery.