Whanganui District Health Board is keeping the pedal down in a bid to improve its immunisation rates across the region.
The latest quarterly figures from the Ministry of Health show the health board has maintained a 91 per cent success rate in child immunisations but the ministry said the board needed to keep the pressure on.
The latest figures cover the second quarter of 2011-12.
Whanganui District Health Board chief executive Julie Patterson told a board meeting the "challenging target" was a number of families still declining immunisation or not completing the series of vaccinations needed.
The ministry said coverage the Whanganui board maintained in the second quarter confirmed it had good systems in place but added the challenge for the board and immunisation providers would be identifying earlier, in the next two quarters, those children who were not being fully immunised by age two.
The best performing health boards were South Canterbury, Southern, Wairarapa and Hawke's Bay with 94 per cent immunisation.
Whanganui District Health Board member Michael Laws suggested the numbers were influenced by a number of factors.
"There's a deal of self-ignorance and fear out there, some of it promoted by so-called health 'experts'," Mr Laws said.
He said it may require the health board to take an active campaign to make sure the children were completing the vaccination programme.
Rowena Kui, Whanganui District Health Board population health and inequalities manager, said the staff continued to be proactive and were always following up with providers.
"Those who are delivering the immunisations for us are often only giving a child one jab. But we need to find out why this is happening," Mrs Kui said.
In March, a ministry spokesperson told the Wanganui Chronicle that Wanganui's ranking was mainly due to 5 per cent of parents who chose not to immunise their children.
This was a parental choice that made it difficult to improve the results.
Primary health and outreach teams worked hard to track down children not being immunised or those who have not completed their immunisation programme.
However, the spokesperson said the percentage only represented a handful of children scattered across the region.
The immunisations cover diphtheria, pertussis (whooping cough), tetanus, polio, hepatitis B, hib (haemophilus type b) pneumococcal vaccine, measles, mumps and rubella.
For children to be fully immunised at age two, they should have completed six-week, three-month, five-month and 15-month immunisations.For more information, go to www.immune.org.nz or call the free phone 0800 IMMUNE.