Kedgley Sue: Health (National Cervical Screening Programme) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Kedgley Sue: Health (National Cervical Screening Programme) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:615;Page:11270] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 First of all I want to correct an impression the Minister gave when she said there was consensus on this bill amongst the parties. Certainly there is not consensus on the part of the Green Party. We would love to be able to support the bill and we worked diligently in the Health Committee to do so. We thought we would be able to do so until at the eleventh hour—in the last minute after the bill had been sent to the select committee after Cabinet had approved it and so forth—suddenly amendments were introduced to the original bill. As I have said this will effectively mean that the privacy of women’s primary health-care records—their general practitioner records—will be eroded. It will mean that an unspecified number of evaluators will be able to have automatic access to the health-care records of any woman who is enrolled in the National Cervical-screening Programme. 
The Green Party’s view is that consent should always be sought before a person’s health-care information and records can be accessed. It has long been recognised that medical records contain highly sensitive and intimate information and need special protection. That is why we have a Health Information Privacy Code that protects the confidentiality of patient information and access to medical records. Indeed New Zealand has been a leader in its approach to privacy—in particular the privacy of health information. Well this bill is the beginning of the erosion of the privacy of health information. Indeed parts of whole sections of this bill are really there to require doctors to get around the Health Information Privacy Code and to require doctors to hand over any confidential health-care or general practitioner records of any woman enrolled in the programme. 
The New Zealand First member said that the women of New Zealand can have absolute confidence that the evaluators who will automatically be able to access women’s personal health information will be able to look only at relevant information. I would like the member to look at the fine print of the bill because in fact when one looks at it one sees that evaluators will be able to access anything they decide is necessary to perform their functions. If we think about it we know that sexually transmitted diseases are thought to be one of the main reasons why women develop cervical cancer. Therefore evaluators could very easily argue that records of women’s sexually transmitted diseases—or anything else such as previous pregnancies—could in their view be relevant to and necessary for their research or evaluation. There is no point in looking shocked as some members are. We have been assured that that is a major reason why women may develop cervical cancer; therefore it would probably be useful for evaluators to look at those records. 
Now in a great concession at the last minute because of the concerns raised by women’s groups around the country—who I might say are up in arms at these last-minute amendments—there has been an amendment introduced that says that when the evaluators are rifling through the health information of any woman on the screening programme a health practitioner may oversee that access—he or she “may” oversee it. We were told that person would be a doctor. I do not know about other members but the doctors I know are extremely busy and I am not certain they will have time to be standing around while the evaluators go through women’s files. But even if they did have time I can assure members that this provision will not reassure many women. Women do not want to hand over to doctors the responsibility for deciding what confidential health-care information should or should not be handed over to authorities. Women want to make that decision for themselves.