Western Australian maternity care is careful, skilled and well governed. The record that holds it together is a booklet a woman carries in her bag, and it is the weakest link in the whole system.
Every woman in the WA public maternity system is given a paper handheld record at her booking visit. It is her clinical record, her education, her consent register, and the only link between everyone who touches her care over nine months: her midwife, her GP, the obstetric team, the ultrasound department, the hospital that eventually delivers her baby.
She is asked to bring it to every appointment. Most women do, most of the time. But pregnancy is nine months long, and life happens inside it. The booklet is left at home on a rushed morning. It goes missing in a house move. It stays in the other car. It gets wet, or lost, or quietly replaced with a fresh one that starts halfway through the story.
Western Australia makes that harder than most places. It is the largest state in the country, and a woman in a regional or remote town may drive or fly hundreds of kilometres for a scan, a specialist appointment or a review. Her care is shared between a local service, a regional hospital and a tertiary team in Perth, and the only thing joining them is the booklet in her bag.
When that happens, the people caring for her are left guessing. A clinician meeting her for the first time has no blood group, no allergies, no clinical flags, and no way to know what has already been discussed. The decisions she made carefully weeks ago are not visible to the team who need them most.
For a woman who has travelled a long way, forgetting it is not a small thing. She cannot go home and come back. She may have taken a day off, arranged care for other children, or relocated to Perth weeks before her due date, away from home, to be near the hospital that will deliver her baby. The appointment goes ahead on what she can remember and what can be phoned through.
And even when the booklet is present and complete, it still costs. Observations are written once by hand, then typed again into hospital systems. Numbers are copied between pages. A midwife spends the first minutes of every appointment transcribing rather than listening. The maternity system is not short of data. It is short of coordination.
Olivia does not change the model of maternity care in Western Australia. It changes what the record can do inside it.
A woman can be at a regional appointment while her tertiary team reads the same record in Perth. Care moves between services without the record having to travel in a bag.
Readings taken over nine months become a line rather than a list. A clinician sees the direction of travel, not just the number in front of them today.
Some things a woman should always have. Some things belong only within her care team. Paper cannot tell the difference. A record built for the job can.
One copy of the most important record in her care, and she is the one who has to carry it.The problem, in a single line
Olivia is in design and build, working through the antenatal schedule visit by visit against the WA handheld record itself. A clinical pilot is planned for 2027.
Email the foundersThe mother app and clinician portal, designed alongside women and midwives across metropolitan and regional WA.
Working with maternity services on how Olivia fits their models of care, governance and existing systems.
A supervised pilot in a real service, with real women and their care teams, evaluated properly before anything scales.