Births

By law, all births must be notified to the Victorian Perinatal Data Collection (VPDC).

The VPDC is a population-based surveillance system and contains comprehensive information on the health of mothers and babies.

What do you have to report?

Any birth or stillbirth that occurs in Victoria.

This includes every birth of at least 20 weeks' gestation or 400 grams birth weight (if gestation is unknown).

Birth data must be submitted within 30 days following discharge.

Who needs to report?

• Health services
• Midwives or the medical practitioners in attendance, when a birth does not occur in a health service

How to report

If you do not have a maternity software program that can automatically upload a birth file, please complete the request form  to access the secure HealthCollect portal.

This is where you can submit information on births to the VPDC. 

Information to include

The VPDC collects comprehensive  information on mothers and babies for all births in Victoria.  Information on the specific data items collected can be found in the VPDC data manual. 

Download the VPDC manual. 

Accessing VPDC data

The VAHI Data Request Hub is a simple way to request Victorian health data.

What do we use this information for?

The VPDC contributes to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's regular reports on Australia’s mothers and babies. 

Recent changes to the VPDC

For 2019 six new fields were added to the VPDC collection:

• Maternal alcohol use at less than 20 weeks
• Maternal alcohol volume at less than 20 weeks
• Maternal alcohol use at 20 weeks or more
• Maternal alcohol volume intake at 20 weeks or more
• Antenatal corticosteroid exposure
• Chorionicity of multiples
• There were amendments made to Episode identifier.