Abstract: Maternity services in New Zealand have undergone some fundamental and unique changes over the last few years. The promotion of competition among providers for clients have had repercussions on the way that maternity hospitals offers services to women. In adapting to this change, it is important that 'the baby is not thrown out with the bathwater'. Unfortunately the most commonly used indicators, and the standard “Patient Satisfaction Survey”, neither of which contain many valuable clues for maternity facility providers to determine the quality of their service from the consumer's perspective. The need was identified for the development of quality indicators to evaluate maternity hospital care. Closely related to this was the need to determine of how dependable providers are at determining what consumers would describe as an optimal maternity hospital service