Goodhew Jo: Human Tissue Bill — In Committee 
Goodhew Jo: Human Tissue Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:643;Page:13051] 
JO GOODHEW (National—Aoraki) 
: 
 I rise to speak on Part 1 of the Human Tissue Bill. I do so to let members know that this bill has been gone over very carefully in the select committee. Part 1 describes the purpose of the bill. The purpose of the Act will be to ensure that the collection and use of human tissue occurs only with proper recognition of and respect for the autonomy and dignity of the individual whose tissue has been collected; the cultural and spiritual needs values and beliefs of that person and their immediate family; and the cultural ethical and spiritual implications of the collection of the human tissue as well. It also takes into account the public good associated with the collection of tissue. 
One of the purposes of the bill is also to ensure that it does not endanger the health and safety of members of the public and that it does not involve the requirement acceptance offering or provision—and this is one of the parts of the bill that the committee was at pains to make sure it got right—of financial or other consideration for the tissue. 
During the discussions on the bill we had to get very clear in our minds that where there was a charge for the storage of human tissue in the case of blood that was collected after the birth of a baby and stored for later use or perhaps blood that was collected for use in blood parts like transfusion or other parts of blood that were used and perhaps sold to a particular district health board those sorts of things did not become prohibited by the bill. It was very important that we got those details right. 
This bill replaces the Human Tissue Act 1964 and just knowing that it has been 43 years since the Human Tissue Act 1964 means that this bill is necessitated by changes in technology—the modernisation of the technology that we use—and in the way we must view the way tissue can be used for the betterment of humankind to promote the solving of the riddles around disease and also as we well know how tissue can be used in organ donation. 
When it came to the purpose of this bill we were always mindful of the fact that one of the forefront issues was whether human tissue could be used for donation. The very next day following the second reading of this bill on the front page of the  
Timaru Herald 
 was an example of how human tissue had been donated by a 17-year-old. In fact he had had no part in making that decision but his parents did. 
Equally there has been some confusion about the register issue in this bill—confusion that obviously has not been resolved because the editor of the  
Timaru Herald 
 said that there is widespread understanding that creating an organ donation register would increase the number of organ donations. In fact the select committee was told quite the opposite—that there is insufficient proof that an organ donation register would be useful. 
A number of quite technical phrases are described in Part 1. We came to understand that “anatomical examination” means the examination of the body or of part of the body for the purpose of study and practice in the science of anatomy. Of course for many many decades—in fact for hundreds of years—bodies have been donated to science. Medical students—and I have to say dental students and other students—would tell us that they have had the use of human tissue to learn from. As a nurse working in Dunedin Hospital I had the opportunity to learn much about the function of the brain. We used brains from people who had died from some disease or from something that had happened to them. That helped us to learn as nurses what we were nursing in the ward which was a neurosurgical or neurological ward. 
One of the phrases in the bill that was quite difficult to understand was “health care procedure”. We needed to understand just exactly what a health care procedure was in order to understand also what a non - health care procedure was.