Craig LizDr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. It's a real pleasure to speak on this bill. As a select committee we the Health Committee heard a lot of really substantive and useful submissions and many of the changes recommended have been incorporated into this bill and I think make it a lot better. As the previous member also indicated the petition of Margaret Dynes was very much before us as we considered this bill in terms of the need to make sure that our health practitioners are competent. So what I want to do is just briefly recap on this bill before then moving forward to a couple of its major substantive amendments.As you'll remember the principal Act was passed in 2003 and it now covers 23 different health professions—that's including the medical profession under the Medical Council of New Zealand the Nursing Council of New Zealand the Midwifery Council of New Zealand the Dental Council of New Zealand and the Pharmacy Council of New Zealand. There have been two reviews of this legislation and the first one was completed in 2009. What that just considered was whether the Act was actually being operationalised as mandated in legislation. But then they did another one in 2012 and that looked at whether the Act could actually manage the future changes within the health system. Both of those reviews basically said the Act was essentially functioning as intended but it made a number of recommendations in terms of change. I just want to go through some of those ones.Under the original Act only health practitioners employers or the Health and Disability Commissioner can actually inform the responsible authorities if they've got concerns about a practitioner's performance. But under this new bill what it means is members of the public or patients if they've got substantive concerns about how a health practitioner is practising can actually go to the responsible authority and talk to them about that. So that's quite a substantial change.The other thing is that at the moment it's quite hard to tell whether responsible authorities are actually doing what they say they're doing and so what this bill introduces is a requirement for five-yearly performance reviews of responsible authorities. What has to happen with those reviews is the Ministry of Health discusses with the responsible authorities what the terms of reference for those reviews are. We got some feedback that you actually need to consult a bit wider on that so we actually also recommended as a select committee that the ministry consults with other groups as relevant to see what those terms of reference are. Then once those reviews are undertaken the responsible authorities have to put them up on their websites—publish the findings.As a result of some of the feedback that we got as a select committee we've also suggested further changes whereby as a responsible authority they have to report—[Interruption]ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Poto Williams): Mr Eagle could you sit down please. Thank you. I apologise.Dr LIZ CRAIG: They have to report to the ministry each year on what they're doing to implement the recommendations of those reviews and what the time line for that is but also if they decide that they're not going to implement those reviews they have to explain why they're not going to. I think that will mean that there's a lot more scrutiny about the performance and what's happening with responsible authorities.There are also some other elements in the bill that look at creating greater transparency. So what the responsible authorities have to do is make public their naming policies in terms of when they're reviewing a practitioner. There's always the balance of needing justice in terms of that practitioner versus the public good—so having those policies about when to name or when not to name a health practitioner—and also how they're going to report their findings.The other thing the bill does which is new is to look at the interdisciplinary collaboration between different groups because in the health sector a lot of the issues that come to responsible authorities are often where the ball's been dropped between different practitioners or different types of practitioners or something's fallen through the cracks and gone wrong. So it's thinking about how we do that streamlined inter-agency and interdisciplinary collaboration to ensure the best outcomes for patients.The other thing that the bill does is ensure that responsible authorities have to provide information on workforce and there's a list of things under the bill that they need to provide including the health practitioner's name date of birth who their employer is and where they work and their average hours worked. I mean we've done that as medical practitioners for a number of years now but not all of the different health practitioners groups are doing that. So it creates greater standardisation.The other thing though when we're looking at workforce planning and thinking about culturally appropriate services and also looking at the gender balance is that the Health Committee recommended that we also include ethnicity and gender data in that collection because it's really important that we're aware as a sector of what our workforce is doing.Debate interrupted.The House adjourned at 6 p.m.