Health information management is not a career for anyone looking for the slow lane: each day is full of pressures and deadlines, forever managing changes to work content, to work methods, in the technology used, and in the demands of hospital management, accreditors, funders, and state and federal legislation. Changes in the workplace are not usually carefully documented or, if such records are made they are usually only the proposals rather than descriptions of actual implementation. If there is a record made, there is no defined place to put it to be accumulated into a history of change. Without documentation, memories fade and personnel move on until no one can say when that important revision to practice took place.

Abstract
The Performance Indicators for Coding Quality (PICQ) is a data quality assessment tool developed by Australia’s National Centre for Classification in Health (NCCH). PICQ consists of a number of indicators covering all ICD-10-AM disease chapters, some procedure chapters from the Australian Classification of Health Intervention (ACHI) and some Australian Coding Standards (ACS). The indicators can be used to assess the coding quality of hospital morbidity data by monitoring compliance of coding conventions and ACS; this enables the identification of particular records that may be incorrectly coded, thus providing a measure of data quality. There are 31 obstetric indicators available for the ICD-10-AM Fourth Edition. Twenty of these 31 indicators were classified as Fatal, nine as Warning and two Relative. These indicators were used to examine coding quality of obstetric records in the 2004-2005 financial year Australian national hospital morbidity dataset. Records with obstetric disease or procedure codes listed anywhere in the code string were extracted and exported from the SPSS source file. Data were then imported into a Microsoft Access database table as per PICQ instructions, and run against all Fatal and Warning and Relative (N=31) obstetric PICQ 2006 Fourth Edition Indicators v.5 for the ICD-10- AM Fourth Edition. There were 689,905 gynaecological and obstetric records in the 2004-2005 financial year, of which 1.14% were found to have triggered Fatal degree errors, 3.78% Warning degree errors and 8.35% Relative degree errors. The types of errors include completeness, redundancy, specificity and sequencing problems. It was found that PICQ is a useful initial screening tool for the assessment of ICD-10-AM/ACHI coding quality. The overall quality of codes assigned to obstetric records in the 2004- 2005 Australian national morbidity dataset is of fair quality.

Abstract
History can be understood as an aggregation of past events. In researching the history of the medical record profession in Australia it is, therefore, fascinating to see how the development of the profession and Association has been marked by a series of milestones that have collectively produced the profession as we know it today. The Association and profession have evolved in tandem, in conjunction with the growing connection between the national and international associations.

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