Coleman JonathanHEALTH (NATIONAL CERVICAL SCREENING PROGRAMME) AMENDMENT BILLFirst ReadingDebate resumed from 28 February.Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN (National—Northcote): It's great to be able to take a short call on this bill—a very straightforward bill and up front National will be supporting it. It's really a technical change to the Health Act 1956 specifically looking at Part 4A sections 112A to 112ZP. And of course the cervical screening programme that we have in New Zealand is something that is absolutely vital for maintaining the health of women across the country. It was instituted following the Cartwright inquiry back in the late 1980s which for ever changed the face of New Zealand medical practice.The changes that we're seeing today which I presume will go unanimously through the House in this first reading are really just modifying the processes that are used around access to the register. So currently it's a very bureaucratic process. What happens—as has been described in some detail I hear by my colleague Dr Shane Reti—at the coalface in terms of the administrative rather than the clinical side is that the clinicians or the practice nurse or the midwife have to actually request access to the register. So they'll see a patient before them and then they have to make a call literally a phone call to someone who is in charge of the register locally and have the information about the patient before them downloaded from the register and then faxed to their practice. Now that sounds pretty much antediluvian. I don't know that there's that many people these days using faxes. Certainly there's a few—I've been known to use one myself from time to time—but you know what this amendment will do is allow the clinician to actually look up the register electronically and of course that is a much more efficient and actually is a safer way of providing care. I mean it seems unbelievable in this day and age that a clinician should have to waste valuable clinical time waiting for a fax to come through following a phone call. The other thing that it does is it removes the need for the Director-General of Health to give approval for designated persons who might have a valid professional interest in accessing the register who seek that approval. So currently you know you might be a health worker working with the Pacific Island community in South Auckland. If you want to access the cervical screening register you have to actually be signed off by the Director-General of Health on an individual basis. What this amendment today will mean is that those health workers with an absolutely legitimate interest will be covered by this legislation and they will then be able to access the register. Privacy concerns of course—you know they are paramount. No one's privacy will be compromised but it's just about making things function in a far more efficient way. The one point I would make is that this legislation here could easily have been rolled into an omnibus amendment bill and it's disappointing that it hasn't been because I'm sure this Government has a very busy legislative agenda. We haven't seen signs of that necessarily so far—I hear there was a large group of Ministers called down to the House the other night to filibuster on their own bill—but I'm sure there's more legislation coming. I mean in the health area in the 100-day programme they've focused on medicinal cannabis. They're having their mental health inquiry. I would have had some suggestions around screening programmes that I would have thought could have been very good to actually bring to the House. So we're dealing with a small amendment to the cervical screening programme which we could deal with in five minutes. I would have suggested to the new Minister of Health perhaps some legislation around the bowel screening programme—perhaps legislation that wouldn't allow him to artificially delay the roll-out of the bowel screening programme for political purposes across the country; or maybe some legislation to prevent him from cutting $20 million of funding of rare diseases medicines about which of course the Minister backtracked on a promise last week; or maybe some legislation to hold him to account for delivering the doctor in Pātea he promised in the election campaign but has subsequently forgotten about; or maybe even some legislation that makes the Government honour its promise to investigate a third medical school. DEPUTY SPEAKER: Come back to the bill. Come back to the bill.Hon Dr JONATHAN COLEMAN: But anyway back to this issue here. Look it's a very succinct issue. I think the fact that actually we're spending House time debating it just reflects the absolute poverty of the Government's agenda in health—not only in health actually but right across their portfolios. I mean it's quite clear that when such a minor technical matter which all the House is going to vote for unanimously and which could have been dealt with in terms of an omnibus amendment bill is a matter that the Government's bringing into the House just four months into their term of Government it shows that this is a Government already after four months out of ideas. But we will be supporting this bill.