Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): It is a pleasure to take a call on this bill. It is a great piece of legislation and it is removing a whole lot of unnecessary barriers that we currently have. It is an omnibus bill and it is surprising when you pass a piece of legislation like this how many other pieces of legislation it will affect. But it is really about making the best use of the skills we have in the health industry. As we know the way we deliver health is changing. We are going from a focus around those big hospitals which are extremely important and where we need to send people when they have the most chronic cases of illness to delivering more things in the community. A lot of our community health providers are very capable well trained and able to do some of the jobs that currently legally within these pieces of legislation they are not able to do. So what it is going to mean is that people are going to have a greater level of access to services and there will be more health professionals out there to do that. Something that I have come across in my electorate—as you would imagine it varies far and wide: we have the Hamilton hospital at one end and we have the New Plymouth hospital and a smaller hospital at Te Kūiti but there is a whole wide range of areas around that rely on health professionals to give them their day-to-day needs. What I am finding is that as we have a shortage of rural doctors—and we know that—something in health that is very important for people particularly older people is to trust the person who is providing their care. So they rely quite heavily on the nurses and the people who are in the medical centres to provide that. When they go there they know there is someone they can trust so even if we do get doctors coming in and out and it is somebody they do not know there is actually a set of health professionals there that can help them. This is all part of the primary care focus. Having worked through some of this on the Health Committee it is really interesting to me to see the actual bills that are affected by this bill. There are amendments around the Accident Compensation Act 2001: any health practitioner providing treatment to the claimant"—so again it is often just wording but it makes such a difference because all of these pieces of legislation have to fall in place. There is the Land Transport Act. As the previous speaker said it is just asking people to go to the medical centre instead of the doctor's surgery which is something most of us do not call it any more. Amendments have been made to definitions around the Mental Health (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Act just changing the name of those people who are being dealt with. I think there are two important issues here within this piece of legislation. They are that the Children Young Persons and Their Families Act 1989 is being adjusted to place an equivalent duty on to health practitioners so that it is in line with the duty of medical practitioners to minimise distressed children and young persons when carrying out medical examinations. To be honest when people go to a medical centre it is often the nurse or the health practitioner who are the ones who actually calm the children down because often they are quite scared particularly if they are going to be having injections and things like that. The other one is the amendments to the Burial and Cremation Act for the other stage of life. It is my pleasure this afternoon to commend this bill to the House."