Reti ShaneDr SHANE RETI (National—Whangarei): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. It's a pleasure to take a short call to progress this bill through its third and final reading. It has been quite a long course for this bill if we reflect back on the two reviews 2009 and 2012 that give substance to what this bill is about. And if we look at the departmental disclosure statement it's very clear that the purpose of this bill is to protect the health and safety of members of the public by providing for mechanisms to ensure that health practitioners are fit to practise.As was commented on we had 49 submissions and what was satisfying was that it was across a whole range of service providers: 16 of the responsible authorities 10 medical professional bodies 17 other professional groups two individual practitioners two interested organisations and some Government agencies. And as the chair has noted the bill was improved by those submissions. I'll come back to one in particular but if we look at a high level as to what this bill does or the actors that it operates on it operates on four main groups. As a consequence of this bill amongst other things patients are able to inform responsible authorities of their concerns for a health practitioner. Previously only a health practitioner employers or the Health and Disability Commissioner were able to refer people to the responsible authority. This is quite a substantial change. This is a good thing. Providers also are improved or their work is facilitated under this bill by prohibiting the publication of their names pending hearing charges and that's at the discretion of the chairperson. What we found out was that sometimes because the tribunal had to meet to make that provision which seems eminently sensible and safe it had actually already gone into the public domain. So there's something in this for providers. Responsible authorities—they're now reviewed every five years and we also did some work on the Health Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal on their funding mechanisms. I think one piece of submission if you like that maybe will need some future thinking and some future work—and post the committee we've continued to have submissions—is in the area of tele health. The argument made to us during the select committee was that we should legislatively require those overseas individuals or organisations who for example view some of our X-rays or scans or whatever to be registered within a New Zealand responsible body. We looked at this quite hard. It was quite challenging to sort of futureproof the bill and the ministry came back to us and said fundamentally that this shouldn't be legislative; that contractually district health boards (DHBs) and the ministry are able to meet the requirements that we think are safe. I think there's still some work to do with that but what we were told was that the ministry's view is that this matter is better addressed through contracts for delivering services. The Ministry of Health can require in its contracts with DHBs and other health providers that services provided by health practitioners be registered with the relevant New Zealand authority or an appropriate authority. So there are mechanisms here whereby contractually rather than legislatively which is the tool we have in front of us we can require those people who are registered offshore—maybe even sitting offshore—to have some relationship with an approved New Zealand body. I think there's still some work to do on that but we were satisfied with the explanation we had from officials that this was still safe that it met the parameters and the scope of what we were looking to do with this bill but I just put it out there that I think it's another piece of work that isn't quite resolved. That aside this is a long piece of work that comes to its conclusion tonight—very good work by the officials. It's quite complex in a large number of sections that they worked on. And again it was collaborative work by the Health Committee. So all that being said it's my pleasure to assist and progress this bill through its third reading.