Collins Judith: Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Bill — In Committee 
Collins Judith: Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:611;Page:8060] 
JUDITH COLLINS (NZ National—Clevedon) 
: 
 I was on the Health Committee throughout the many submissions on and long process of this particular bill and I have some concerns about it. One of the things this bill tries to do is to give to the health professions other than the medical profession a system along the lines that the doctors have with the Medical Practitioners Act. However it does not quite do that. Worse than that it tries to have a one-size-fits-all sort of approach to the many professions and occupations involved in the health sector. 
To give the Committee an idea of the groups that submitted to the Health Committee—all wanting to be defined as health professionals under this bill and all wanting to have some sort of official sanction because they are currently unlicensed and unregulated—I will list some of them. They included acupuncturists ambulance officers anaesthetic technicians applied behaviour analysis practitioners—whatever that is; I am sure there are a few members on the other side of the Chamber who could tell us because they have probably been to them—audiologists audiometrists embalmers social workers speech language therapists and traditional Chinese medicine practitioners. There was a huge range including a whole lot more that are listed in the bill but that I will not read out now. One of the reasons this bill does not do what it is supposed to do is that it does not include any of those particular groups. 
It does however deal with chiropractors dentists dieticians medical practitioners nurses occupational therapists pharmacists physiotherapists psychologists and a couple of others including optometrists. Unfortunately those groups are not always going to be happy with the results of this bill because they wanted some good legislation that treated them as professionals but this particular bill does not really do that. It is all about giving a tremendous amount of power to the Minister to control those occupational groups. They really will not be able to call themselves professions when the bill is enacted because part of being a profession is having a self-regulatory authority. This particular bill should be named the “Minister’s Regulatory Authority for All People Connected to the Health Sector Bill”. It should not be called the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Bill because it is all about taking away from professional bodies groups and highly trained professionals the right to regulate themselves. There is a reason for that: the Minister does not have any faith in the doctors to know how to be doctors the nurses to know how best to be nurses or the occupational therapists to know how best to be occupational therapists. Unfortunately this bill will not solve the problems of the very many groups that currently work in the health industry. That will be a tremendous disappointment. 
This particular bill apart from being somewhat late in coming back to the House is a tremendously huge omnibus bill and has very very little to do with assurance of health practitioners’ competence. If anything it really has more to do with cultural competence. In fact it should be called the “Health Practitioners Cultural Competence Assurance Bill” because that is in fact one of the main requirements of this bill. That is one of the reasons the National Party would not in a month of Sundays support this sort of bill or its title. Instead of our just providing for professional and ethical competence we now are regulating for cultural competence but unfortunately this particular bill does not say what that is. But the nurses union knows what it is—it means whatever it says it does. That unfortunately is a very sad fact. That is why this bill should be renamed perhaps the “Health Practitioners Cultural Competence Assurance Bill” but that might require someone to define what “cultural competence” is and nobody on the select committee could possibly come up with that sort of suggestion.