Rurawhe Adrian; van Velden BrookeURGENT DEBATESHealth—Death of Patient at Middlemore HospitalSPEAKER: I have received a letter from Brooke van Velden seeking to debate under Standing Order 399 the findings of the independent inquiry into the death of a patient at Middlemore Hospital. This is a particular case of recent occurrence for which there is Ministerial responsibility. Public confidence in the health system and in the Government's response to any problem with it is an important issue that warrants setting aside the normal business of the House to debate. Before I call Brooke van Velden I have also received a letter from Jan Logie seeking to debate the report of the Ombudsman on the murder of Malachi Subecz. There can only be one urgent debate on a sitting day. However I am willing to consider Ms Logie's application tomorrow if she wishes. I call Brooke van Velden to move that the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance.BROOKE VAN VELDEN (Deputy Leader—ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker. I move That the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance.Every day New Zealanders engage with our healthcare system. Thousands of people actively seek help from other New Zealanders who go to work to help make people better. We most of the time hope that other people can solve our problems because of the knowledge that they have and the care that they have for us. On very rare occasions people go to the emergency departments and they need desperate help. They are really in the time of their most vulnerable point of their life needing assistance from other people to help them get better.Now in the case of this 50-year-old woman who went to Middlemore Hospital she was turned away from the care that she needed because the hospital was under such pressure. I'm sure there will be many New Zealanders up and down our country who are wondering: could they possibly be put into the same situation as this poor woman who lost her life because she did not receive the care that she needed when she was at her most vulnerable?People often go to the emergency department not even for themselves but for their children or for their husbands and wives when they know that they are desperately needing somebody else and they have no idea what's gone wrong. We put our faith in the fact that we pay our taxes so that we have a public healthcare system that will look after us when we desperately need care.When we have children with broken limbs that need to be set immediately we hope that the emergency department can be there for us. When we have something desperately wrong with our heads in the case of haemorrhages going on—or strokes; I know a lot of elderly in particular encounter the emergency departments in times when they've had a stroke—it's so vital that they get really good-quality and very time-sensitive care to make sure that they can extend their lives and live a long healthy life.We often encounter the healthcare system in a time of anxiety when we really do need care from other New Zealanders who get up every day and work hard to keep us safe and keep us healthy. But there is this poor case of a woman desperately needing help and it wasn't received.So on behalf of New Zealanders who have read this inquiry or have heard about the inquiry into Middlemore Hospital and wonder if this will change anything or things will simply stay as the status quo it's important that the Government is held to account and is able to answer questions that New Zealanders will have about our healthcare system. Will this report into Middlemore Hospital actually change anything? Will we see wait times decrease? Will we see the number of beds in our hospitals increase? Will people know that when they need to go hospital there will be workers who are able to answer their call for help?The issue here under this inquiry says that they found an overcrowded emergency department and a hospital well over the acceptable capacity. They found that only the hard work and dedication of Middlemore staff was keeping it from more serious incidents and the environment is unsafe for both patients and staff and it's not sustainable.There are wonderful New Zealanders who work in our emergency departments. They are often stressed they are often overworked and it's because we have a healthcare crisis. We don't have enough people working in our emergency departments or across the entire healthcare sector to care for the number of people that are often looking for care.We need to know from the Government what they are doing to make sure that there are adequate numbers of workers in our emergency departments that people aren't overworked when they're needing to create diagnosis and that in the future we can be guaranteed that there will be enough doctors and nurses and triage staff there to make the right decisions in a good amount of time rather than making decisions based on the fact that they are overworked overtired and too stressed to make a good decision.We also need to know what the Government will do to increase the number of bed capacity in our country. It's not just contained to Middlemore; we have this issue across our hospitals in the whole country. When we were talking about the COVID response in particular we had lockdowns because the health Minister and the Prime Minister and everybody involved with the Government told us we don't have enough beds to care for the number of people who are needing care during the COVID pandemic. Well most of that is over but we still don't have enough beds for the flu season. What is happening to make sure that in ongoing years we are going to have enough bed capacity for the people who need our emergency departments on any given day? We can't keep blaming it on COVID; we need to have an adequate response to what the acceptable level of care that a New Zealander can expect in their healthcare system is.We need to know that when a kid is really hurt and their parents are stressed and worried and they are taking them in a car or in an ambulance to hospital they can get the care that they need that they can get a bed in a hospital that they need and they're not going to have to wait overnight then over days or go back home to then come back the next day and be in a constant state of stress. We need to know that they get the care as quick as humanly possible without overworking the staff that we currently have. We rely on public confidence for our entire democratic institution. Every day people get up and work and pay their taxes because they know that they're contributing to the Government taking our money and spending it on things that people know that they can collectively contribute to—things like the police things like health and making sure that we have an education system. I don't think New Zealanders would be happy to know that we are spending wastefully millions and millions and millions of dollars on projects that don't deliver any benefits for people. And yet at the same time we have a healthcare system that is crippled. We have a healthcare system that can't give adequate care to people in their time of need. That's a basic role of this Government—that people put our faith in our institutions. We collectively work together to become a community and pay our taxes so that we can help each other in our time of need and that's not happening in this case. We have to do better.I think people would also ask the question of what this means for our immigration settings. You know we have a lot of people internationally who do work in the healthcare profession and we know that they should and could come to New Zealand to help our overburdened healthcare workers. Why has the Government not responded adequately to allow nurses for example on the fast track of the Green List for residency? That is a barrier to helping to reduce the issues within our emergency departments. It's one simple point that the Government could make and one that we've been calling for in the ACT Party. We also need to know why the Government hasn't been adequately addressing the need for more productivity and more economic growth so that people can become wealthier and over time pay more taxes. Over time that means we can actually increase the amount that we spend in our healthcare system without overburdening everybody else's need for funding within the Government departments. We know that we are not as wealthy as some of our OECD comparative countries and that means that we can't spend as much on healthcare as other countries. It's a shame that we don't put enough emphasis on the need for economic growth and the benefits that this could provide to our entire economy—but importantly how much we can spend on giving people valuable care in their time of need. We also need to train more doctors. What is this Government doing to make sure that we're not just bringing in people from overseas to help with our workforce shortage but that we can train people here in New Zealand who want to be trained? We've had a cap on the number of doctors that we train every year for quite a while. Is the Government seeking to increase this so that we can actually have more people in our emergency departments and more people who can help people in their time of need or does the Minister of Health believe that the number of doctors that we have currently being trained in our country is adequate? Because looking at this report saying that it's an overcrowded emergency department hospitals are well over capacity and it's unsafe and unsustainable surely that means there is need for change. Or is there? I question the Minister about whether or not this Government believes it's important to train more doctors. Do we need to train more nurses? Same question. Are we training enough people in this country who genuinely want to work in the nursing profession to give people care in their time of need? That's the same issue. We are just so overburdened and over capacity within our healthcare system that there has to be a better way. I think that we need to acknowledge the tragedy that's occurred and make sure that this doesn't happen to somebody else and that if it was a preventable death those deaths remain preventable. It is a tragedy to the family members and the friends of this woman who lost her life because she didn't get the care that she needed when she was desperately in need of it. It's important that our healthcare system learns from this incident now and that we don't just have a report and it goes into a filing cabinet somewhere and nobody ever reads it—nobody from the Government departments reads it nobody from the new Te Whatu Ora reads it. It's important that this loss of life doesn't go nowhere. There are New Zealanders who will be reading and hearing about this poor woman's case and wanting to know whether or not this will happen again in the future. Will they get the care that they need will their children get the care that they need will their family members and friends get the care that they need or would a preventable death not occur? Would it happen? It needs to remain preventable if at all possible.I want to end by acknowledging once again this woman who lost her life. We're very sorry that that happened we share our condolences with her family and friends and we hope that our healthcare system and the Government can learn from this report. Thank you Mr Speaker.