Maternity Services Consumer Satisfaction Survey

Date of Publication: January 2003

This survey represents the views of 2909 women who gave birth in New Zealand during February and March 2002.
The objective of this survey was to review women’s perceptions of maternity services, and to assess whether there has been any change since women were last surveyed in 1999. In order to allow a comparison, questions from the 1999 survey were used for the 2002 survey. Minor amendments were made to a few questions with three questions being entirely new.

Between 1999 and early 2002, there was little change to the maternity framework. The core documents were the Section 88 Maternity Notice (1998) and the service specifications for maternity facilities, secondary maternity, tertiary maternity and pregnancy & parenting education. These documents did not alter during this period. It is therefore assumed that any improvement in the level of women’s satisfaction is the result of consolidation of the system, and of improved service delivery by individual practitioners and providers.

The survey confirms that women consider some key aspects of maternity services as being crucial. Women consider it is essential that they can choose a Lead Maternity Carer (LMC) and that this LMC will then ensure that the woman has many choices in the management of her care and involvement in the decision-making. Women also consider it is essential to have a choice of where they will give birth, have home visits, availability of primary maternity facilities, collegial relationships between LMC and secondary maternity services, and no consumer costs for core maternity services.

The survey results give an average improvement of 2.06%, based on the number of women who agreed or strongly agreed to nineteen questions measuring satisfaction levels. However, the intensity of women’s views has increased – the average improvement is 7.4% when only taking those women who strongly agreed.

In general, the improvement is consistent across all indicators.

The survey allows women’s experience of maternity services to be considered at a number of levels. In whatever way it is analysed, it is essential to recognise that women, in describing their own experiences, provide a valid measurement of maternity services.

---

Document availability

This document is available on this website in Word and PDF format below.


(Word, 977 kB)
(PDF,476 kB)

This publication has been converted to Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). Here is a link to information on downloading and viewing PDFs.

---

Related information

Maternity

Ministry of Health media releases

Ministry releases maternity services consumer survey (media release)