Sio Hon Aupito William; Williams PotoHon AUPITO WILLIAM SIO (Minister for Pacific Peoples): I'm happy to make a contribution to this bill and I want to acknowledge the Minister of Health because not only has he produced a comprehensive bill to this House that incorporates the recommendations made in the reviews of 2009 and 2012 which they should have done something about but they did not—not only is the bill made available for the Opposition to see—but you also have a departmental disclosure statement as well as the regulatory impact statement which I think will help members of the Opposition to make a meaningful contribution to this particular debate.I think it's important for the House to note that we are debating amendments to the 2003 Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act an Act that was introduced by a Labour Government I might say and an Act that when it was introduced by a former Labour Government was considered groundbreaking legislation and was recognised internationally as being significant for health regulation. The focus of the Act was about promoting and providing public health and safety and it provided for consistency in accountability regimes for practitioners' practice conduct and competence. The Act regulates as my colleague the Hon Dr David Clark said 23 health professions and is considered as a significant piece of legislation aimed at protecting and providing public safety.The Act does ensure health practitioners are competent and fit to practice their professions and requires that in order for people to claim to be members of their profession they must be suitably qualified and registered within that particular authority for their particular profession. So the origins as my colleagues have previously said go back to the original review in 2009—and then again in 2012. The 2009 review found that the Act was generally operating as intended but recommended a number of legislative amendments to clarify the Act's interpretation and improve its operation. The recommendations from the 2012 review aimed at providing tangible evidence of responsible authorities' performance better visibility of decisions about practitioners' performance greater recognition of the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and cooperation and better workforce information.So the first change that this bill is introducing is the performance reviews of responsible authorities. Many of us that use our public health system or our health services often don't know that there are these health practitioner authorities that register and have an obligation to regulate health practitioners—we don't. From time to time my office in Māngere has received a consistent flow of complaints. They're complaints about our health system and that occurred right through the nine long years that this Opposition were in power. The complaints were often about the lack of services or lack of accessibility of service but from time to time I would often receive a complaint about how they were treated by a health practitioner.Now one of the things I learnt when I first came into Parliament was from the former Minister of Health Annette King who said We don't want to create an environment where we're constantly blaming our health practitioners. We have to create an environment where our health practitioners can own up to mistakes that are made and look at making changes." And so there's a bit of a balancing act that has to be acquired—the right to make complaints absolutely but also the right to recognise that we're all human and that we will make mistakes. But I think the challenge that we have—an ongoing challenge—is to make sure that the environment is such where people can own up to their mistakes and look for ways of improving. I would hate for our country and for our health systems to get to a point where—I've seen reports from other countries—they deliberately hide the mistakes that are made and only years after do we ever find out about it.So the authorities that register and certify the competence of these health practitioners they will now be under a regime where their performance and them taking greater responsibility for ensuring that the health practitioners are carrying out their functions as intended by the Act—are actually able to do that. The bill introduces five-yearly performance reviews for responsible authorities—and I'm talking about authorities such as the Nursing Council of New Zealand and other medical groups. This will provide the Crown and the public assurances that these authorities—which we are asking them to—take on board the watchdog role on our behalf. And so it gives us some assurances that these authorities are carrying out their functions effectively and efficiently.The reviews will be conducted as I understand by independent reviewers. Those reviews will be against a set of indicators developed by the Ministry of Health in consultation with each of those responsible authorities. The resulting reports from these reviews will be published on the authorities' websites which is the same thing that the Education Review Office does when they conduct reviews of our schools and our educational facilities. Those reports are often published on each of those schools and that gives us some confidence about what is happening within those organisations. So this performance monitoring will enable continuous improvement within the regulatory system and I think it will make it easier to promote good practice and increase the consistency across the board within these responsible authorities.So the second change is making information about an authority's decisions or orders about disciplinary decisions more widely available. This goes back to my previous point that the public has to have confidence that our health practitioners are competent and have the ability to be able to carry out the practice to make sure that people are safe. Making information about the authorities' decisions and orders—particularly when somebody has been disciplined making that available is going to be important. Currently limited information is available to the public. The bill will require authorities to release information about decisions on practitioner practice to the person who has firstly notified them about the concerns and it would also require authorities to develop policies that set out how they make their decisions about releasing the names of health practitioners whose competence or fitness to practice or conduct has been reviewed or investigated and the names of health practitioners whose conduct has failed to meet the expected standards may be named when it is in the public interest.I note that with the Law Society when they discipline somebody that is made publicly available. We see it in the newspapers and sometimes they won't reveal the name of the lawyer that has been disciplined but certainly having that information knowing that really gives the public confidence in the role that these authorities play. It also gives us confidence about the people who are charged with the responsibility to provide health and protection to our general public. There is one other thing that I wanted to just point out and that is that in the regulatory impact statement there are five recommendations that are pointed out there. There is one that makes reference to changes to enable interdisciplinary communication and the point that was made there is that often mistakes are made because there's the lack of communication between the practitioners that are dealing with one patient. Now that makes sense because here in this place we all are trying to get the Government to provide this whole-of-Government approach to service our families—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): I apologise to the honourable member. Your time has expired."