Case Study: Western Sydney Local Health District achieves increased early antenatal access and improved patient experience with Civica's My Experience Matters

Boosting access to Auburn Hospital Antenatal Services through understanding and responding to patient experience

Western Sydney Local Health District’s Auburn Hospital Antenatal Services (AHAS) faced a critical access problem: only about 4% of pregnant women in their catchment were attending their first antenatal appointment within the recommended 12–14 week period, putting mothers and babies at increased risk. Using Civica’s My Experience Matters patient feedback platform (on the Civica Experience cloud), the district sought to understand barriers across a culturally and linguistically diverse population and lift first‑trimester attendance toward a 50% target.

Civica’s My Experience Matters was used to collect multilingual, in-person survey data via iPads with bilingual volunteers, producing automated, customisable reports and text analysis within 24 hours that revealed root causes and reframed the project scope. Insights led to simple operational changes—such as daily birth-status checks to cancel and reassign appointments—which within 11 weeks (three months) freed up and rescheduled 109 antenatal appointments, reduced data-collection time and costs, and gave the Western Sydney Local Health District clear benchmarks and deeper patient-experience intelligence for ongoing improvements.

Western Sydney Local Health District

Julianne Harvey

Julianne Harvey, Innovation and Redesign Project Lead