Willis NicolaNICOLA WILLIS (National): Talofa lava. I cannot start my speech without acknowledging the Hon Kiritapu Allan. When New Zealand now talks about or thinks about cervical cancer I'm sure many of us have her face in our minds. I want to take this opportunity in the House to commend and congratulate the Minister on her bravery in sharing her story with New Zealand because I think it has had a powerful impact across our communities in terms of women's willingness to have screening to go and have those tests and that is an incredibly powerful thing to do. I just want to put on the record for this House Kiritapu that we on this side of the House stand with you as you work on your recovery. We wish you every piece of wellness on the journey you are on now and we wish you a very good recovery. This bill is about making the technical changes that are needed to ensure we have modern healthcare services available in our society. It's a great case of where technology and innovation have gone ahead and the law unfortunately hasn't kept up. So National absolutely supports this bill for the practical changes that it makes. I want to acknowledge the select committee which I didn't sit on but which I understand has heard a number of submissions on this. I want to acknowledge Dame Sylvia Cartwright who is the figure who stands in the background whenever we talk about cervical screening and the processes used. And actually having now read this bill and looked at it in preparation for my contribution tonight I want to acknowledge the healthcare workers and the clinicians and the people involved with the cervical-screening programme who have had to put up with a ridiculously outdated framework governing Act for far too long. I almost coughed on my coffee when I read that the status quo is that currently when cervical screening providers need to access clinical information about individual patients they do so by fax that the National Cervical Screening Programme staff fax the information to them. So I just want to do a shout-out to those staff and the people on the other side of the fax; they should not have been having to put up with such outdated technology and such an outdated mode of communicating for so long. I am glad that Parliament is taking the opportunity to remedy that and allow them to move into 2021 and the technology and options we have available to us. It's my view that if we want to provide good modern healthcare to New Zealanders then the things that we should be considering are: what can we do to make that healthcare better to ensure people get it sooner and to ensure that wherever possible they get it closer to home? What this bill essentially does is it makes it easier for people to get the screening that they need. It makes it more convenient. It will encourage more people to do it. Those are good things. It shows the power of technology to improve healthcare because by having databases that are more accurate that are more easily updated and by ensuring that more people are able to access them for appropriate purposes what we actually have is an end result for the patient and the end result for the patient is that the healthcare people in their life have connected up the information about that individual's health. That is I think what we should expect in terms of all healthcare practices—that wherever possible people are joining those dots on the patients' behalf so that they get the care they need as soon as possible.I can't help looking at this bill and thinking to myself Doesn't this highlight how far New Zealand has to go?" but also what an opportunity we have to improve our health services by harnessing the power of technology because this is just one area of our health system where things have fallen woefully behind. We are still in a situation where data sharing even between GPs and hospitals even between hospitals in one DHB and hospitals in another DHB—even sharing information accessing information about my own children's health records is still overly cumbersome too difficult. That is because we haven't fully harnessed the power of the technologies that are available in our modern world. It's my view that if we do that we can actually provide much better care to people fewer things get missed and more people get the services that they need.This bill deals with screening. Screening is a vital form of primary healthcare. If we get screening right we are right at the prevention end of things. And I know that all of us in this House share a view that it is better to prevent things than it is to have to treat things down the line. So having a good framework for managing the national screening programme makes good sense from a primary healthcare perspective and will ensure that the screening programme is more accessible and is just simply more practical for more people.One of the things that this bill does and deals with that we are having to grapple with across the board when we look at technological amendments when we move from fax to computer is this issue that there is the potential for privacy to be compromised there is the potential for data to be compromised there is the potential for individuals to have wide access to information that they could misuse or manipulate. So I am pleased to see that this bill sends a strong signal by creating an offence for those who might choose to amend the cervical-screening register without authorisation. That is something that modern technology may make easier to occur but of course it would be a very grave offence in that doing that could compromise the health of not only individuals but many people but would also I think very importantly undermine trust in this database in this system. That is something that we all need to protect here. Women need to know that when their most personal data is being held in a national register it will be protected it will be looked after that it is there to look after their health and that it won't be compromised in any way. And I think offence provisions like this while I very much hope they won't have to be used in the sense that I hope there aren't abuses of this register they do allow for a very strong signal to be sent if that occurs.Finally I think in this bill what we see is the power of research and development innovation to unlock future ways of both preventing screening for and treating cervical cancer. Because what we see in the detailed provisions for example is the fact that we now are moving to screening for HPV primary screening for the human papilloma virus—forgive me medical people listening—rather than simply screening for examining cells. That reflects the fact that we now have better research we have better information about what are the precursors to cervical cancer but we also know that this bill will accommodate some of the new ways we have of screening that are easier for women that are better for women that potentially allow them to feel more mana and dignity in the testing process and that I really hope—I really hope—will ensure more women do the testing we so need them to do so that they can live good long lives and so that if they have problems we can catch them as early as possible.I'm also hopeful that there will be further research and development there will be further technological development that means that in the future fewer women in this country die of cervical cancer that fewer women in this country have to go through the trauma and sadness of what we now all know as a nation is a very extreme form of treatment for a very serious disease. Yes this is a small and practical step but it is important and I say again to the Hon Kiritapu Allan I have you in my thoughts tonight."