Australia's mothers and babies

A standardised extract of electronic data from each state and territory collection is provided to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) annually. Records received from states and territories are anonymous: that is, they do not include any names or addresses, but do include a unique set of identification numbers so that the source record can be identified. Data are checked for completeness, validity and logical errors before inclusion in the national collection.

Figure 1: Overview of maternal and perinatal data collections and national reporting outputs

Varying coverage for data items

Some topics in this report may exclude data for selected states and territories for reasons including:

• changes in definitions or data collection methods in a state and territory that mean the data item is not comparable over time (trend analyses only)
• data are not currently collected by a state and territory, or are not collected in a format that is comparable with the specifications for the NPDC, NPMDC or the NMMDC
• data are not currently supplied by a state and territory for the NPDC, NPMDC or NMMDC. Data items that are not part of the Perinatal NMDS are not mandatory for provision to the NPDC, and there are currently no Perinatal NMDS items in the NPMDC.

NPDC, NPMDC and NMMDC exclusions are noted in footnotes under data visualisations, and are also available in the accompanying data tables. These exclusions apply to both the numerator and denominator for rate calculations, and the data presented are not representative of the jurisdictions excluded.

Detailed information on completeness for all NPDC data items used in the web report and data visualisations is available in the National Perinatal Data Collection data availability resource interactive data visualisation tool. Also see Table 1 in Data availability.