National maternity collection

NMDS information is complete from July 2000.

Claims information is collected from 1996 and is complete from July 2002.

Health event information loaded from NMDS includes all maternity events in public hospitals. It also includes publicly funded events in private hospitals and primary birthing units.

Primary maternity services data quality is variable. The clinical meaning of claims must be inferred. This is because the records in the source system relate to payment for a service rather than to a clinical treatment or event.

An improvement in the quality of claims data is noted from July 2007.

More information is in the National maternity collection data dictionary.

National maternity collection data dictionary — Data dictionaries

Primary maternity services information is reported to Health NZ on standard forms by:

• lead maternity carers
• general practices (GPs)
• specialists.

This data is entered into the Health NZ maternity claims system.

Publicly funded hospital-event information is provided to us in an agreed electronic file format for public and larger private hospitals. Smaller private facilities and primary birthing units send us paper forms and a cut-down electronic file format, which we manually process.

MAT receives weekly extracts from the:

• NMDS
• NHI
• Health NZ maternity claims system.

MAT is only accessed by authorised staff for the purposes of:

• maintenance
• data quality
• audit
• analytics.

When a woman registers with a lead maternity carer, she can expect that her health information will be used for the following purposes.

• Treatment and care.
• Planning and funding of health services.
• Carrying out authorised research.
• Training of other healthcare practitioners.
• Preparing and publishing statistics. 

We are required to make sure that the release of information meets the conditions of any legislation related to the privacy of health information. In particular the:

• Official Information Act 1982
• Privacy Act 2020
• Health Information Privacy Code 2020
• Adult Adoption Information Act 1985.

Your information may be used in research approved by an ethics committee or when it has been anonymised.

If your health information is used in research or statistical purposes that is:

• published and you could be identified from the data, the researcher must get your consent and ethics approval
• not published or is published in a way that does not identify you, the researcher does not need your consent.

Where information is requested on a mother and her pēpi, the Adult Adoption Act 1985 provides greater restrictions around its release than with standard health information privacy legislation. This is to protect the privacy of mother and pēpi in the case of closed adoptions. These extra restrictions will inform our decision-making process in these cases.

MAT is the primary source of data for our annual report on maternity. We also publish selected provisional maternity data to help complete planning and service reviews in a timely manner.

Customised datasets or summary reports are available on request. These can be electronic or on paper.

Our team can help to define the specifications for a request and are familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of the data.

As some data elements have been added or deleted, we may not be able to provide consistent time-series data.

We also offer a peer review service to make sure Health NZ data is reported appropriately when published by other organisations.

There may be charges associated with data extracts.