However, Lakes District Health Board ranks 19th for shorter stays in emergency departments, well below the 95 per cent target for patients being admitted, discharged, or transferred from an emergency department within six hours.
Health board service manager Roger Lysaght said there were some good clinical and administrative initiatives, including patient flow and rostering changes for emergency department doctors, but these had not yet translated into improvements against the target. This quarter, the health board has dropped one point in better help for smokers to quit, to 99 per cent, but it still heads the table and is well above the 95 per cent target.
This means 99 per cent of hospitalised smokers are provided with advice and help to quit.
Health board smokefree team leader Pip King said that during the past 15 months, the board had made this a priority because of the high number of smokers in the population compared with the rest of New Zealand.
"The staff at Rotorua and Taupo hospitals daily see the damage of tobacco on the health of babies, children and adults which can be irreversible."
She said hospital staff asked all patients 15 years and older if they smoked tobacco.
Smokers are then given brief advice to quit and cessation support if required. Support is also given to smokers while they are in hospital, by providing nicotine replacement therapy. In the three further league tables, the health board is ranked first equal for shorter waits for cancer treatment, ninth for more heart and diabetes checks and ninth for increased immunisation for children.
Bay of Plenty District Health Board, which includes Whakatane, has again failed to meet its immunisation target ranking 17th - and the chief executive Phil Cammish said it needed to do better.