.png)
About Best Birth Finder
Best Birth Finder (BBF) is a free service that:
captures reviews from women of their birth experiences in Australia
provides a draft feedback email (based on the review submitted) that women can then send to their birth service/hospital. (Note: this does not apply to women who birth with privately practising midwives.)
allows women to search reviews to find their best birth
BBF caters to births that have occurred in Australia only, either in hospital or at home, with or without a registered birth attendant.
There is no restriction on how long ago the birth occurred.
All reviews are published WITHOUT reviewers' names and addresses.
BBF does NOT allow reviews of individual birth clinicians. We explicitly ask that no clinician names be included in birth reviews.
See our Privacy Statement and Terms of Use.
BBF is a project of Maternity Choices Australia (MCA), Australia's leading maternity services advocacy organisation for the past 30+ years.
We are a group of volunteer mothers and birth professionals dedicated to improving birth outcomes and maternity care options for mothers and babies. You can find out more about our work at www.maternitychoices.org.au.
Please consider supporting our work by donating to Maternity Choices Australia.
Maternity Choices Australia (formerly Maternity Coalition) has been campaigning for more than 20 years against the steady rise in birth intervention rates. However, in the same period there has been no improvement in stillbirth rates and suicide and iatrogenic harm are the leading causes of maternal death.*
Our maternity care system is not improving outcomes for mothers and babies, nor does it attempt to provide women with information about the full suite of birth choices available to them.
Yet over the last two decades our federal government has held inquiries and published strategic plans to improve maternity outcomes. The latest one is Woman Centred Care: Strategic Directions for Australian Maternity Services. You can also read more about it here.
It is a worthwhile, evidence-based document, but state governments are not mandated to implement it, hence the lack of change. And until BBF, there has been no system for capturing data that relates to these Strategic Directions. This is our attempt to bring greater visibility to women's outcomes and how they measure up to the government's goals for improving maternity care.
However, our main wish for BBF is that it helps women around Australia learn more about birth services in their region so they can make the best choice for their care.
BBF is free, takes about 10 minutes to complete and relates to births in Australia only. Births in hospital, or at home (or elsewhere) and with or without a registered birth attendant can be entered into BBF.
Enter data for each field in order, as some fields will be displayed or hidden depending on your choices in previous fields.
We do NOT publish clinician names in BBF, so please do not include clinician names in your reviews.
Your name and email address will NOT be published with your review.
After you click Submit, you'll be emailed a copy of your review, which you can use as a basis for your feedback for your birth service.
We will then check your review before publishing it to ensure it does not contain any clinician names. This generally takes 24-48 hours, as we are volunteers, but in the mean time, you can read published reviews.
BBF is a free service funded by Maternity Choices Australia and created with lots of volunteer effort. We would love your support though! Please consider donating to MCA to support the ongoing development of BBF and our other advocacy work.
No, we do not permit the specific mention of any clinicians' names in BBF. We ask every woman submitting her review to not include clinician names in any of the text fields and we check every review before it is published.
The intention of BBF is to help women discover their local birth choices, which includes birth at home or in hospital. As over 98% of women birth in hospital, our focus is on the choices available in birth services rather than individual clinicians.
Homebirth Australia maintains a directory of private midwives and private obstetricians can be found on private hospitals' websites and the RANZCOG website.
After you submit a review in BBF and you birthed in the care of a hospital, you will receive an email copy of all the data you entered PLUS a draft feedback email to send to your birth service, along with relevant email contacts.*
If you birthed with/without a privately practising midwife in your home, then you will receive an email listing all of the data you entered, not a draft feedback email. (See "Are midwives and obstetricians reviewed in BBF?")
Our intention is to make it easier for women to send feedback - the good and the bad - to their birth service. If you want help with preparing your feedback email, you can contact our free maternity advocacy service Mothers Matter.
Care providers rely on our feedback to design and build better services so your feedback will make a difference. Health services are in fact required by Australian Safety and Quality in Healthcare standards to work with their local communities to co-design their services. (See Standard 2: Partnering with Consumers.)
While health services do have channels for receiving feedback from their community, they are not always easy to find. With the challenges of new motherhood providing feedback about a birth can be a daunting task. But without this vital feedback, birth services are left to operate the way they always have.
It is only by coming together and making our voices heard that change is possible - to ensure better care for the mothers and babies of Australia.
* If you entered "Self-managed" model of care and "Home without a registered care provider" place of birth, you will only receive a copy of all data you entered without the draft feedback email.
Yes, our volunteer maternity services advocates can discuss your feedback in a free phone call as part of our free Mothers Matter service.
The data​ you enter (anonymised, i.e., without your name/email address) will play an important role in helping us advocate for better birth services for the mothers and babies of Australia.
​
Maternity Choices Australia (formerly Maternity Coalition) has been Australia's premier maternity service advocacy organisation for over 30 years. As volunteers and mothers, we advocate at the coalface of federal and state government to bring about our goal of "every woman, every choice".
​
Unfortunately, in spite of our efforts, we fail to see our maternity services give women access to the evidence-based, compassionate care they need and deserve. What goes unreported goes unnoticed.
Birth trauma rates and medical interventions are rising steeply, yet we see no improvement in stillbirth or PND rates. Who is benefitting from this system as it stands? Certainly not mothers and babies.
​
One of our biggest challenges as maternity service advocates is the lack of organised data from the hundreds of women we hear from every year. Government and birth services take little notice of the rafts of scientific evidence we continue to present, so the women's stories we share are largely ignored as well.
​
Something has to change. This is where your outcomes and experiences (all anonymised of course) will make a difference. We also hope that by providing an easy way for you to send your feedback, health services will finally see the real impact they are having on the women and babies they serve.
As long as you can walk out their doors, they see their job as done and as they do not follow up with women, they are unaware of the lasting impact they may have had.
We are grateful for the information you share with us. The privacy of your data is extremely important to us. Your name and email address will never be shared. You can read our privacy statement here.
Yes! BBF is absolutely free and developed with the labour of our volunteers and funds raised in the past by Maternity Choices Australia (MCA).
BBF is a long-held dream by our volunteers and we are so excited to have birthed this baby! Please consider supporting the ongoing development of BBF and our other advocacy work by donating to Maternity Choices Australia.
As a volunteer-run, non-profit organisation, we run on a shoe-string budget that relies on donations and membership dues. So, we're always up for receiving financial support!
You can make a donation to our work at Maternity Choices Australia.
You are always welcome to join one of our monthly board meetings help us in our campaigning work. Contact secretary@maternitychoices.org.au to find out more.
Check our latest activities on Facebook.
Sign up to our newsletter here.