Media release from the Waikato District Health Board

It will be a special day tomorrow for one child at Waikato Hospital.

Sometime in the morning, that child will become the 1000th child opportunistically immunised at the hospital under the newly established Hospital Opportunistic Immunisation Service.

The service contributed to Waikato DHB exceeding the national 'Improve immunisation' health target one quarter ahead of schedule.

Of the Waikato's success, Ministry of Health report commentary read, "With excellent progress this quarter, Waikato DHB's coverage rate exceeds the target. The innovative approach taken by Waikato DHB impressed the target champion during his recent visit".

Waikato DHB chief executive Craig Climo was quick to recognise the collaborative effort between Health Waikato immunisation services, non-government organisations and primary care in being the key to Waikato's success with this target.

"The 84 per cent result is very good and a solid improvement on the 80 per cent for the previous quarter. It is even better when viewed against some years of the results being hard to move.

"The turn around is due to new hospital based activity (opportunistic screening) and identifying and targeting hard to reach families, and particularly the efforts of primary care."

Pinnacle chief executive John Macaskill-Smith agreed with Mr Climo's sentiments, saying "Precall - not recall" is the primary care aim, and has lead to a greater uptake for childhood immunisations.

"Primary care staff are more aware and are taking a proactive approach with the immunisation schedule.

"The ability to work collaboratively with both outreach services and the National Immunisation Register has enabled primary care workers to ensure all children and their families are offered immunisation opportunities."

Population Health operations manager Andrina Romano said it was important to highlight the reduction in coverage disparities between ethnic groups. This is a result of the outreach and mobile immunisation services targeting areas of priority as well as the National Immunisation Register and a lot of hard work by the two Waikato Maori primary health organisations - Toi Ora PHO coalition and North Waikato PHO.

In addition, she said since the health targets were put in place by the Ministry of Health in June 2009, Waikato had improved its results by 10 per cent - the third highest improvement nationally.

Ms Romano said one of the qualities that has made the Hospital Opportunistic Immunisation Service so successful and sustainable is that nursing staff have been trained to carry out the immunisations themselves, so opportunistic immunisation has become business as usual and doesn't rely on one health professional.