Dyson Ruth: Health Practitioners (Replacement of Statutory References to Medical Practitioners) Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDyson Ruth: Health Practitioners (Replacement of Statutory References to Medical Practitioners) Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 18 August 2015. Volume:707;Page:5922. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): I noted the words of the member Scott Simpson who has just resumed his seat when he said that he was going to do a thorough rigorous and diligent perusal of this bill at the select committee and I commend those wishes. I wish he had done half as much of that on his attack—unfounded ill considered and factually wrong—on the former Minister of Health the Hon Annette King. That member should look up the facts before he starts attacking other members of this House because what goes around comes around and it will be his turn very very soon.When we were elected to lead the Government in 1999 we had a total of 43 radiation therapistsin New Zealand—43. Is that enough radiation therapists to service the needs of New Zealanders who have cancer? I will give you a clue. The answer is either yes or no and it is not yes. The answer is no.What does a Government do if someone presents at a hospital or at a doctor’s with cancer but there are no trained staff available to treat them? Should we send them home? Should we send them to the backblocks of Coromandel where Mr Simpson comes from? Shall we send them home or shall we pay for them to go to Australia—where they will get their treatment—until there are enough trained staff in New Zealand? So what is the answer—what is the answer? Scott Simpson has not got a clue. He has just demonstrated that. There were 43 radiation therapists when his party left Government in 1999 and within 3 years that number had doubled—[Interruption]The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! Now I want the House to settle down. We do not have comments like that. Speaker’s ruling 48/2 refers to that. We will not have that again.Hon RUTH DYSON: Thank you very much Mr Assistant Speaker. This bill is another contribution to being able to ensure that we can provide health services to people who are in need of them. But before I get back to the specifics of the Health Practitioners (Replacement of Statutory References to Medical Practitioners) Bill—that has got to win the award for the longest title of a bill so far this year—and to support the legislation can I add another warning to Mr Simpson. Just 9 or 10 months ago his Minister of Health received exactly the same warning about the shortage of trained staff able to treat New Zealanders with cancer as the previous National Government had received in the late 1990s and he ignored it. The then Minister of Health between 1996 and 1999 got the warnings in writing from the Ministry of Health saying: “You will not have enough trained staff to treat cancer patients in New Zealand. There will be a crisis.” That Minister of Health did nothing and that is exactly what Tony Ryall and Jonathan Coleman have been doing in the last 2 years. There were exactly the same warnings in writing to the same Ministers and they have been ignoring it.Hon Member: What a load of rubbish.Hon Annette King: We will table it.Hon RUTH DYSON: We will certainly table it Mr—I cannot remember his name—whatever.It is not very usual with the current Government that Labour is able to support legislation. For example earlier this evening we had a couple of hours of debate about how National is proposing to sell off our State housing stock. It tried it in the 1990s and it is doing it again now. Those members have got all sorts of magical words that they are weaving around it but in the end they are hocking off a significant asset putting some of our most vulnerable individuals at risk—The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! That is not part of this debate.Hon RUTH DYSON: So we could not support that legislation but we are able to support the bill that we are debating at the moment. It has taken an awfully long time—7 years—to bring this bill to the House.I could give the Minister of Health and his predecessor some advice. They should have just looked in the members’ ballot because Annette King has already got a member’s bill in the ballot that does considerably more than this. This amendsonly six or seven pieces of legislation. Annette King’s member’s bill without the resources of the huge Ministry of Health amends 21 pieces of law in exactly the same way as this health practitioners amendment bill does. In fact there are 59 pieces of legislation that need amendment in this way and we have managed to get only seven out of this current Government. They are good moves; we certainly support them. But why has it taken the Government so long and why is it such a shonky little bill? It is not nearly robust enough—seven legislative changes instead of what the Ministry of Health recommended which was changes to 59 pieces of legislation.So how does this issue come about and why are we debating the bill? Well the issue comes about because years and years ago the only people who had the training to enable them to do some jobs in the health system were doctors. They were the only people who got the training. Over the last few years particularly since Annette King was the Minister of Health and we had the introduction of extended scopes of work and new titles—for example nurse practitioners—we know that now nurse practitioners as one of a few examples are trained and are competent to deliver their scope of work but they are not allowed to within the law. There are some things that they are trained and are competent and able to do but the law forbids anyone but a medical practitioner from performing them. That is just because the statute never caught up with the practice and that is what we are fixing today.I hope that during the select committee process there will be some pressure put on the Ministry of Health and indeed on the Minister to get the rest of the legislative changes on to the floor of Parliament because it is clear that all parties agree with these changes. I imagine—I have not heard from Mr Seymour from ACT. It is fabulous to have your presence with us tonight unusual though that is in the Chamber. But I am hoping that even Mr Seymour will be supporting this legislation. It is certainly sensible.So I do not know why we have not got all 59 needed legislative changes included in this bill. I do not know why when there was a priority of 10 identified in the regulatory impact statement that we ended up with only seven and I certainly do not know why it has taken 7 long years to get to this state. I know that it does not assist with training the additional cancer specialists whom we are short of but I do know that it will help relieve the huge—and predicted to be increasing pressure—that we have on our doctors. This will enable competent qualified trained “other” health practitioners—and they are described in this legislation as health practitioners sensibly in my view to avoid future extensions of scope that might allow other than nurse practitioners the ability to perform these tasks.It does not explain why we have not covered off all the necessary changes. But the ones we have got in this bill are changes to the Accident Compensation Act which are primarily around a health practitioner having input into a rehabilitation plan and to the Burial and Cremation Act which will allow a qualified person other than a medical practitioner to certify that someone has actually died—David Seymour: You’ve run out of steam.Hon RUTH DYSON:—and I hope that they do not take too close a look at the member who is interjecting.There are amendments to the Children Young Persons and Their Families Act for medical examinations of children and to the Holidays Act so that a health practitioner can testify that someone is actually too unwell to be able to go to work—they might be too busy on public business across the road to be able to go work but you do not need a health practitioner to be able to do that. Also there are amendments to the Mental Health (Compulsory Assessment and Treatment) Act—changes to that and changes to the Misuse of Drugs Act.So as I said at the beginning this is a bill that we strongly support. It is long overdue. It is short in terms of the breadth of legislative changes that are needed which were recommended by the Ministry of Health and without any explanation were not presented to us. I look forward to its progress in the House.