Collaborative Maternity and Newborn Dashboard for the COVID-19 pandemic

Why did we form this collaboration?

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a range of unprecedented changes to maternity care delivery in all Australian hospitals. Metropolitan Melbourne has experienced the most restrictive lockdown measures in the country. The impact of these changes on health outcomes for pregnant women and their babies is currently unknown.

While the Department of Health collects detailed pregnancy, birth and newborn data from on all births in the state, there is typically a significant lag time between data submission and public release. While individual hospitals monitor their own outcomes, no single hospital is large enough to detect significant fluctuations in uncommon complications such as stillbirth. However, by joining forces, our 7 health services (including 12 hospitals) will capture 100% of the metropolitan Melbourne's public hospital births. 

Our collaboration will be able to quickly analyse routinely-collected, de-identified data on mother's and babies from each of nine hospitals, and report back to participating health services on a monthly basis. Furthermore, we will have detailed information that will enable us to examine specific questions as they emerge, thus providing an agile surveillance system to "take the pulse" of our maternity sector during this public health emergency.

CoMaND member health services

The Collaborative Maternity and Newborn Dashboard includes all public maternity services within the Melbourne metropolitan region:

• Mercy Health (Mercy Hospital for Women and Werribee Mercy Hospital)
• The Royal Women’s Hospital and The Women’s at Sandringham
• Monash Health (Monash Medical Centre, Dandenong Hospital and Casey Hospital)
• Northern Health (The Northern Hospital)
• Western Health (Joan Kirner Women’s and Children’s Hospital)
• Eastern Health (Box Hill Hospital and The Angliss Hospital)
• Peninsula Health (Frankston Hospital)

The CoMaND project is based in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Melbourne and is registered with the Australian and New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ACTRN12620000878976).

Acknowledgements

• The CoMaND project has multi-site ethics approval from the human research ethics committees of Austin Health (HREC/64722/Austin-2020) and Mercy Health (HREC 2020-031). 
• This project has been made possible by the generous support of the Norman Beischer Medical Research Foundation and the University of Melbourne Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.