Reti ShaneDr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): We are acknowledging that there has been an administrative error. We are acknowledging that. I want to talk about what is being delivered and what will be delivered regardless of that administrative error. I want to talk about it in several domains. I want to talk about access I want to talk about actually doing health stuff and then I want to talk about our workforce and how regardless of this administrative error we can still do what we were planning on doing. We have heard other speakers talk to it as well.Let us look at access across the spectrum of a life. Initially it was the under-5s—they get free access to healthcare. We increased that to under-13s—they now get free access to healthcare. But what is not often talked about is from 13 onwards—the other part of a life. Now they benefit from something called Very Low Cost Access and probably at least 50 percent of the population is enrolled in primary health organisations. They get improved access at a co-pay cap of around $17 to $18. So access to healthcare will continue to be high quality and available regardless of this administrative error. The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am going to interrupt the member. I have been relatively flexible in dealing with this debate to date but all other members have at least made an attempt within a couple of minutes to address the question that is before the House which is the urgent matter. Just saying misallocation" is not I think addressing the urgent matter for which the House has currently adjourned its normal business in order to consider. Now I am not going to restrict the member—as I have not previous members—from discussing other matters but he at least has to do more than wave in the direction of the matter before the House.Dr SHANE RETI: Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. This administrative error is going to have some consequence but we are reassured that it will not have a consequence that affects New Zealanders' access to the good quality healthcare that we receive. I absolutely believe that. As we said we put our hand up and said: "Look we made a mistake in the modelling." It is easy to do. I have done modelling as well and it is easy to take an input and misinterpret it and realise at a later date that maybe it was draft input that we were looking at. By all accounts that is what we understand to be the issue here. That aside the administrative error will not change what we are planning to do. We have heard that from the Minister—we have the appropriations here. We know that the budgets are set as they are set. I am going to talk to the Northland budget specifically in a few moments because obviously it is an area close to my heart. I was making the point that access will not change with this error. Access will not change to primary care nor will it change to secondary care. In the Budget we know that they will be doing more first specialist assessments. That means that access to secondary care is also going to continue to improve regardless of this administrative error.So we have got access to health services—let us look at actually doing stuff. Is this going to change anything we are doing? Now in primary care we know that the utilisation has gone up since we increased the cover to under-13s. We know that because the utilisation formula that was calculated for the capitation that first came out has been reviewed and my colleagues are all telling me that they are doing an awful lot more as well. We also know that in elective surgery we are doing a lot more. That will continue to happen under this Budget as it was projected and predicted. In fact we are doing 40 percent more than we were in 2008. So we are able to get to services better; we are able to do more.I want to talk about the health workforce and address some of the questions that my colleague over there was talking about again in primary care. I will start with that. Primary care does have some challenges. Health Workforce New Zealand is working very hard on that. I think that 50 percent of GPs over the age of 50 may be retiring in the next 5 years. So we know that workforce in primary care is an issue but we have been doing things with that. If we look at the Health Practitioners (Replacement of Statutory References to Medical Practitioners) Bill what we did there was look to give other allied health professionals an increased scope to do some of the work that doctors and others might do more particularly the nurse practitioners. We gave them increased scope to sign sickness certificates and do death certificates and other things. So we are addressing that part of it. So I take some issue there.Certainly across the district health boards (DHBs) if we look at their workforce again we are providing funding for that and will continue to regardless of this administrative error. In fact what we know is that in the DHBs there are 2250 more doctors and 4640 more nurses. When I was a resident medical officer (RMO) at Northland DHB when I first started we had nine RMOs. There are now 90. The workforce is clearly increasing.To briefly conclude Northland receives $21 million in this Budget and regardless of this administrative error the core services that Northland DHB will deliver will I believe be unchanged and be the same quality they have always been. Thank you."