Insights The Cost of Birth Trauma: Why Early Screening Matters

Birth trauma is common, impactful, and often hidden, and this year’s national conversation is turning to what it actually costs.

In June 2026, RANZCOG and Birth Trauma Australia convened the inaugural Cost of Birth Trauma Roundtable, bringing consumers, clinicians, and policymakers together to examine these costs and identify what needs to change.

In Australia, one in three women describes their birth as traumatic. With nearly 287,000 births in 2023, the Australasian Birth Trauma Association (ABTA) estimated that up to 100,000 people and families may experience birth-related trauma each year, with 58% experiencing both psychological and physical trauma.

These impacts extend well beyond the postnatal period, shaped not only by clinical events but by communication, consent, and system conditions, and often resulting in long-term psychological distress, chronic pain, sexual dysfunction, relationship strain, and reduced workforce participation.

Economic modelling shows that perinatal mental health conditions carry substantial societal and productivity costs, a burden compounded in rural and regional areas by workforce shortages and fragmented care pathways.

Much of this cost stems from what current systems fail to capture. Pelvic floor dysfunction is one of the most common, and least recognised, consequences of birth, often emerging months or years after delivery, yet current Medicare arrangements fund only a single comprehensive postnatal attendance between four and eight weeks, with no funded pathway for the ongoing, multidisciplinary care many women need beyond that window.

The same gap shows up in disability systems, where functional impacts of birth trauma are frequently overlooked. One roundtable participant put it simply: “I didn’t have a disability sticker, even though I was disabled”. Clinicians carry a cost too: participants described cumulative stress, vicarious trauma, and moral distress from working within a strained maternity system, a workforce cost with its own system-level risk.

When birth trauma isn’t explicitly screened for, identification relies on self-report, and cases go unrecognised until they resurface later, often at greater personal and system cost. Birth trauma is a core perinatal mental health issue that can occur after any type of birth, defined by parents’ and families lived experience rather than clinical outcomes, and it can present differently to, or alongside, depression and anxiety.

Positioning it within the perinatal mental health continuum, and screening for it as part of standard care, is one of the ways services can act on the roundtable’s call to modernise postnatal care and strengthen early identification.

Diginostic's goal is to help prevent trauma from compounding: enabling birth-specific assessment alongside existing PMH measures, so services can identify trauma sooner, respond in an integrated, parent-centred way, and connect families to support before problems become entrenched.

Using validated tools such as the City Birth Trauma Scale (CityBiTS) within a digital platform can provide a systematic and consistent process.

The CityBiTS is fully integrated into the Diginostic Platform, automatically scoring responses, uploading event summary reports directly into the Electronic Medical Record, and surfacing jurisdiction-specific resources to support follow-up care.

The process supports trauma-informed principles throughout:

•   Ensure Safety through gentle questioning

•   Trustworthiness via clear and transparent processes

•   Choice by allowing parents to control what they share

•   Collaboration through shared discussion of concerns

•   Empowerment by helping families recognise and name their experiences

Beyond the individual encounter, the roundtable called for stronger national data and reporting to make the long-term costs of birth-related trauma visible, and to strengthen recognition of chronic functional impacts within disability assessment pathways. Diginostic's platform has measures in place to support this directly: reducing reliance on self-disclosure, generating consistent data for health services, and sharing relevant data with the AIHW to help build the meaningful, national-level datasets the roundtable identified as missing.

Reducing the cost of birth trauma, to families, to clinicians, and to the system, depends on recognition, prevention, early intervention, and coordinated recovery. Diginostic supports this shift by embedding birth trauma screening in routine care, giving services timely insight and giving parents and families the recognition their experience deserves. Read the full RANZCOG Cost of Birth Trauma Roundtable report for the complete findings and recommendations.