Preterm Birth Prevention Dashboard
The dashboard will draw upon the WHA clinical dataset to provides meaningful analytics that assist time poor clinicians to quickly identify the pathways of care that are achieving the best outcomes for women with a given cluster of common characteristics or risk factors.
The aim of this work is to move beyond benchmarking care that has happened in the past and towards supporting maternity care providers to have access to timely, meaningful, and relevant data to inform care of women today and tomorrow.
About WHA
Women’s Healthcare Australasia (WHA) is the peak not-for-profit body for health services providing maternal and newborn health care across Australia. For more than 30 years, WHA has been supporting information exchange, benchmarking and peer networking among executives and staff of both specialist and general maternity hospitals. WHA is a highly regarded multidisciplinary organisation in which the unifying interest of members and staff alike is to enhance the health and wellbeing of women and their babies.
WHA’s members care for 83% of women giving birth in a public hospital each year. This provides a rich opportunity for robust benchmarking and sharing of data amongst peer services. Our Benchmarking Program offers a unique opportunity to share data with and learn from peer women’s & newborns services.
Data Sharing Through WHA
For many years WHA has been providing its members with benchmarking reports and data dashboards on a range of clinical indicators that helps them to understand comparative performance, identify opportunities for improvement and evaluate the safety & quality of their labour and birth care in relation to peers.
While the use of indicators is helpful for assessing comparative outcomes with peers and trends over time, they are less helpful for understanding the relationships between women’s characteristics, their care, and outcomes. For example, it is not possible using the indicator dataset to assess whether the trend to rising rates of induction of labour is influencing the trend to rising rates of postpartum haemorrhage for women and nursery admissions for newborns.
For this reason, WHA has more recently been collecting non-identifiable clinical data for each woman to support in depth analysis of the relationships between women’s risk factors and needs, their care during labour and birth, and the outcomes being achieved for them and their babies. This dataset currently contains more than 620,000 births and presents an exciting opportunity for robust analysis of how to optimise care for women and their babies in the Australian context.
About the Australian Preterm Birth Prevention Alliance
The Alliance is a national partnership of clinical leaders, researchers, health departments, and communities working together to safely lower the rate of early birth. In 2021, the Federal Government provided $13.7 million to the Australian Preterm Birth Prevention Alliance to deliver a national program of work over three years to safely reduce rates of preterm and early term birth.
One of the undertakings of the Alliance is to develop a national dashboard to monitor rates of preterm birth and inform service and clinical leaders about the efficacy of their prevention efforts. To date this dashboard has been hosted in the Quality Improvement Platform, Life QI, to support Hospitals participating in the Every Week Counts National Collaborative. To expand access beyond participating teams this will be moved to a Power Bi dashboard hosted by WHA.
