Hutchison Paul: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hutchison Paul: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 29 June 2010. Volume:664;Page:12253. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Dr PAUL HUTCHISON (National—Hunua) 
: 
 Thank you for the opportunity to speak in this debate on the performance and current operations of Crown entities public organisations and State enterprises and it is with great pleasure that I speak on the MidCentral District Health Board and the health service in general. Undoubtedly National has reignited life in New Zealand’s health service and the MidCentral District Health Board is one of the classic examples. 
Let us look at the board’s performance against the basic performance criteria over the last three quarters. Firstly diabetes and cardiovascular health services came up from fourth in the country to third in the country. That has to be pretty good. Then we get to the “better help for smokers to quit” health target and in that area the board came up from twelfth in the country to fifth in the country. That is very very good progress indeed. Increased immunisation is of course absolutely vital for the children of New Zealand and the board came from sixteenth in the country up to ninth in the country which is a great result. On the issue of shorter waits for cancer treatment radiotherapy the board has come up from nineteenth in the country to first equal. So the MidCentral District Health Board deserves to be congratulated on the clear evidence-based progress it has made over this period of time. 
There is absolutely no doubt that under National we have seen as I said earlier a reignition of life in New Zealand’s health system in stark contrast with the previous 9 years when we saw increased bureaucracy and wastage a dismal productivity result which was basically zero as was clearly identified by successive Treasury reports and very very poor value for money. 
What is extremely important for the MidCentral District Health Board as for district health boards around the country is workforce. In 2010 we have just realised that our nursing workforce for instance is now 46000 which means a total of 1000 more nurses than the previous year. That is a very good result given the difficult times. Let us just think about what happened under the previous Labour Government. All it could do was strategise about workforces. There was committee after committee strategy after strategy and nothing whatsoever happened. 
Under this very good National Government we have seen immediately the creation of Health Workforce New Zealand under Professor Des Gorman and there are some very innovative things going on there but also the voluntary bonding scheme which has worked extremely well. It includes graduate doctors midwives and nurses and it has been oversubscribed for a second year in a row with 501 new health graduates just joining the scheme. It was salutary to learn this afternoon that we now have 1400 doctors nurses and midwives accepted into the scheme which offers a student loan debt write-off or cash incentives to stay in New Zealand. Labour had plenty of time to do a creative initiative like that but it failed to do so. It is vitally important for district health boards like MidCentral District Health Board. This year’s intake includes 45 midwives 392 nurses and 64 doctors. In fact almost half of new midwifery graduates have joined the scheme. Of course it takes time for those improvements to work through. 
What we have today is the legacy of Labour’s dismal performance but fortunately we also have the reignition of New Zealand’s health service through the National Government. 
Report noted.