Williams Poto: Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliams Poto: Home and Community Support (Payment for Travel Between Clients) Settlement Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 18 February 2016. Volume:711;Page:9169. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]POTO WILLIAMS (Labour—Christchurch East): Tēnā koe Mr Deputy Speaker. Firstly like previous speakers on this bill I want to commend the work of home-care support workers. I want to spend a little bit of time talking about the work they do and the value that they bring to our communities.Many of us have had our lives touched by the work of home-care workers whether they are coming in to support elderly parents people with disabilities people at the end of their lives people who are injured and are temporarily off work or people who are injured and need long-term care. Being able to stay in your home with the people you love around you—you cannot put a value on that. You cannot put a value on what being in your own home brings to your ability to have a good quality life.What support workers do in terms of supporting really good care—the best kind of care; supporting our families to be around their loved ones supporting people to be in the homes and communities of their choice—is completely invaluable and to acknowledge that we are going some way to recompensing them fairly is encouraging. Unfortunately we are going nowhere near far enough because the value they bring to the lives of the people they support is without measure.I want to talk a little bit about the type of work that these home-care workers do. It is not just about keeping someone’s home clean and making sure that their meal is prepared. It is not just about home help or personal care. It is often very very intimate care. It is often very high-level highly trained care. I know that when I was working in the sector myself we had people who were able to support medically fragile children to be at home. We had people who were able to support a family to care for their loved one at the end of their life. There is nothing more personal than that. We had people who were able to support people with serious skin conditions to be able to bathe and dress and then be in a position to get on with their day.Support workers actually provide for and facilitate people to live a life like you and I have. They are able to provide support for people to dress and to get on with their day whether that is in education in work or in study. Without our home-care support workers our ability to do what we want to do to have the choice to live the lives that we want to live would be greatly diminished. I cannot speak more highly of that.Previous speakers have talked about the agreement that had been negotiated and mediated and settled between the unions who represented the workers the home-care providers and the Crown agencies that fund the work. It is encouraging that what we are doing is really giving effect to what is already an agreement that is in place.But there is another part of the agreement that I hope some day we will be able to effect—two things. Firstly it is about regularising the work and ensuring that these workers actually have the ability to have security in their work and security of payments. Currently because their work is client-based they do not have that security. It would be great to have the ability to provide that security. The other aspect of the agreement that I really hope we would be in a position to support is the review of the sector as a whole. In previous speeches I have talked about why we are at this place now putting into effect the travel time provisions.What has happened over time—and it has been several years since I have actually been in the sector myself—is that there have been different forms of assessment for the needs of our clients. This is a process that I believe started with the Auckland District Health Board a few years ago when it was looking at the way we assess care for our older recipients of care at home. The district health board was looking at who was in the best position to assess the needs of clients and then deliver that care and what came out of that process was the fact that we could assess someone’s care. Where in the past we may have been delivering say 2 or 3 hours’ worth of care into that home we could assess that care and change the way we delivered that care to a shorter period of time. This meant that in the normal workday of a home-care worker where previously they may have had two or three clients now they might have five or six clients. The distances they are travelling and the time they spend travelling have therefore increased. I think this is a point to make for what may happen in the future as well—that increasingly our home-care workers will be required to become more mobile not less.I think this is a good thing that we have identified that the travel is actually work. It is an essential part of what they do and increasingly it will become more and more a part of home-care workers’ lives to actually be engaged in travelling as they service more clients.There is not much more to say on this bill. I really am encouraged that we have traversed this with some speed through the House that we actually gave it due consideration and that the Health Committee was able to ensure that work with ACC was also included in the bill which is very important. Our home-care workers are also often working with ACC clients and it would be unfair and imbalanced if they were not included in this.Just on the final note I want to say again I really acknowledge the work that support workers do. I hope that one day we value their work in the same way that we value the work of other people who provide types of support in our communities such as our first responders. The work that first responders do has a value in our community and I would like to see that we as a Parliament and as parliamentarians really try to set the bar high for our home support workers that we raise the status of their work in our communities and that they have some equity with the work that other professionals do. It is a great pleasure to support this bill and I commend it to the House.