O'Connor SimonSIMON O'CONNOR (National—Tāmaki): I am very pleased to take a call in this general debate. Actually it will be on the topic of health which will be no surprise to anyone seeing that I chair the Health Committee. In fact it is around the work of the Health Committee that I want to begin and just to acknowledge first and foremost the people who are putting and sending through many many petitions. The Health Committee is incredibly busy—just shy of 20 petitions—and in fact another one came today from the Life Matters Suicide Prevention Trust from Corinda and Denise on the steps of Parliament here asking us to look more into suicide and mental health in New Zealand. We have petitions too from everything from tube weaning to smoking in cars from the use of marijuana to breast cancer psychoactive substances autoimmune injectors—and the biggie which often comes up around euthanasia or assisted suicide.I thought I would just quickly touch on that—a sort of an update both to the House and those listening around the scope of this particular petition we are dealing with. It came out of the work of the Hon Maryan Street as a petition and the Health Committee to date has received 22000 written submissions all of them pretty much unique—in other words they are not form-generated; these are individual submissions. This is unprecedented in the history of this Parliament. Eighteen hundred people have asked to be heard by the committee—in and of itself again unprecedented for this Parliament any Parliament. And we have elected as a committee all nine of us to hear from those 1800 people and we are well under way.Speaking more broadly now moving to the whole Government agenda there is a lot of positive news in the health space for the Government. Fundamentally and built on increased funding year after year—I know this is constant good news to the Opposition and just from the sounds I can hear from them at the moment I am sure that is absolute joy not opprobrium; it is joy I am sure. There are three things I want to quickly note.One is around telehealth or the use again of telephones and tech services to access health. About a year ago seven helplines were effectively merged into one—so the likes of Healthline Quitline and the Gambling Helpline. Instead of having them separate now they are coming through one system and over the last year about 425000 Kiwis have been assisted. This is a 24-hour 7-day-a-week hotline staffed—triaged if you will—by everyone from nurses through to care support workers. It is a fantastic system. When I did some very basic maths basically we are saying that in the year that it has been in operation there is one contact every minute and 81 percent of calls are handled within—sorry I have to read my notes on this—20 seconds which I think is fantastic and built on a $12 million boost by the Government. The other thing is around kidney donation. This is something I have been quite interested in and I am sure the committee has too with the organ donation discussions we have had. In recent days we have actually had New Zealand's first effectively three-way kidney transplant: three kidneys and three donors. This is not the usual way that it works but it works incredibly well and with a spot of luck it will help us increase the number of transplants in New Zealand. I think it is really important too that we understand that the Ministry Health through the Minister's direction is working through some of the dynamics around transplants at the moment.The third element I want to highlight I think is around the mobility teams—probably forgotten by many in the House unfortunately. We have invested a substantial amount of money into developing these mobility action teams. That work is around musculoskeletal issues basically—think of the likes of arthritis right through to orthopaedic problems. So it is about teams to support people to get mobile because atrophy—as Opposition parties know—is really a killer. The second mobility team has been formed and it is here in Wellington I believe which will be good news to my colleagues here—including even Grant Robertson the local MP here in Wellington Central.Grant Robertson: I have a high threshold for being impressed but that does sound impressive.SIMON O'CONNOR: He does sound impressed and I am very pleased about this. I just want to finish off by acknowledging fundamentally those amazing community groups that are supporting our healthcare system every day. I want to acknowledge the likes of the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research which we had here a few weeks ago celebrating 50 years of medical research. In that vein I also attended a forum the other day by the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand—amazing work. I also want to draw the House's attention to two wonderful groups which are coming into this Parliament actually in the following weeks. We have got the Lung Foundation which is going to tell us about effectively this cancer killer—the largest in New Zealand. It will come in next week. We also have macular degeneration one of the major issues for New Zealanders the week after. So I encourage—I encourage—members to come along and hear about the—