Verrall AyeshaHon Dr AYESHA VERRALL (Minister of Health): I thank the member for his question. When I think about the winter plans that we've seen during just this term of Government there's been successive improvements in every one and a strong focus on hospital management in the winter of 2020 and 2021 and essentially an emergency plan much like was part of any pandemic or flu plan that wards would be shut down and hand care suspended in order to make space for an anticipated large volume of patients. In the end because of the COVID response and subsequent vaccination response those worst-case scenarios never eventuated but it is certainly the case that there were disruptions in the system and planned care in particular suffered as a result and we are catching up from that. This year the stand-up of the new health entities enables a much more sophisticated approach to winter making sure that we respond as a whole system not as 20 different silos. That enables us to look at areas where there's been fantastic local innovation and disseminate that innovation across the system. I visited an excellent service run by the pharmacists in Upper Hutt the same ones that did mine and the Prime Minister's COVID vaccination and they run a minor ailment service there. Children with skin infections scabies or lice and children with fever can get treatment direct from the pharmacy. There's a GP available in support if that's necessary but it's usually not because these pharmacists are very experienced. It's just one example of the way we're working to make care more equitable to make sure that care is delivered near your home so it's convenient and to make sure that all of our professionals are working at the top of their scope rather than having to jump through hoops through the system which ultimately doesn't respect them and is inconvenient for patients. I do want to speak about some of the lessons learnt and for that member I know the Delta outbreak was particularly impactful on his community. I think there were considerable lessons learnt by our public health teams in terms of how to work with community how better to build trust when you're talking about illnesses infectious diseases that are stigmatised and when there is a lot of public interest in in those things. I could list a number of things a number of innovations which we are lucky to continue to benefit from. We have excellent contact-tracing infrastructure and that means that we are responding rapidly to things like measles cases in a way we haven't been able to before all underpinned by state of the art technology that we developed for COVID. We have the tools of community mobilisation that we built up during COVID and we're much more keen to use those to have communities mobilising themselves around their vaccination needs knowing that harder-to-reach communities are more likely to come forward when they see familiar faces in trusted spaces. We have a much more sophisticated technology for our recall for immunisations and we're much more able to target our resources—for example we know exactly where we need to be in terms of getting the measles vaccine out in Auckland at the moment. All our hospitals' ventilation has been upgraded. We have expanded ICU capacity. Every ICU I go to looks like they have new facilities where they are able to take care of more patients and safely with safe ventilation there which is good for COVID but good for the long-term resilience of our health system. We have tools in epidemiology like whole genome sequencing and waste-water epidemiology. That means whatever infectious diseases threats come our way we are much better able to respond and we have an experience and knowledge of health at our border that will help us be able to deal with any international threats in the future.