Simmonds PennyPENNY SIMMONDS (National—Invercargill): Talofa lava Madam Speaker. I'm pleased to speak in support of the Health (National Cervical Screening Programme) Amendment Bill in its second reading. As previous speakers have said this is largely an administrative change. The bill amends Part 4A of the Health Act 1956 to enable health professionals who provide services to women along the cervical-screening pathway and their support services staff to directly access this information from the National Cervical Screening Programme register. The key amendments are really ensuring that this information is available in a modern and timely manner. It's almost unbelievable that currently the access to this clinical information occurs via fax. It's incredible not only from a technology perspective but also from a privacy perspective that people are standing around waiting for something like this to be coming through on a fax and so we certainly support this becoming a much more modern means of accessing this information. It's important that women understand or are assured that privacy is going to be well catered for. The amendments will allow providers to look up the information directly by using secure log-on access via the internet. It is important to note that the relevant provisions of the Privacy Act 1993 the Health Information Privacy Code 1994 health professional regulatory constraints and employment and contract law are unaltered by the amendment. The National Cervical Screening Programme manager retains the administrative control over who they grant secure access to the information and it remains an auditable activity. So all those privacy concerns are still catered for. As my colleague Dr Reti has already traversed this bill picks up on work that was initiated by the previous National-led Government. So we support this bill bringing this basic amendment in which brings the clinical information process into a much more modern set-up. It will certainly speed up the process for smear-takers getting this information and being able to discuss it with their patients without compromising their privacy and of course we would support anything that makes it easier for women to access primary healthcare. We know that the National Cervical Screening Programme makes a fantastic contribution to the lives of New Zealand women and so we again would want to support any improvements with that. Cervical screening as Dr Liz Craig has noted is a key tool in maintaining the health of women across the country and being able to get an immediate improvement to the way we access this information on the national cervical screening register is imperative to these improvements. The bill will enable also future upgrades to the IT that supports the register and how it's used as well as future improvements to the screening programme but it retains that strong control over the register. I wanted to just bring in some context from my own electorate where WellSouth have been doing some research on their primary healthcare network. They analysed individual-level data from the entire WellSouth enrolled population as of 1 January 2019 on key health indicators of which cervical screening was one of those indicators. WellSouth's target for cervical screening of women with up-to-date smears is 75 percent. That's in line with the current 2010 primary health organisation performance programme target of 75 percent or more of eligible women in that 20 to 69 years age group enrolled in their practice to have had a cervical smear recorded in the last three years. What WellSouth found was that they were not meeting that target for either Māori or non-Māori women with 63.9 percent and 61.7 percent. So the point was well made by the Minister that while this amendment will bring improvements in accessing information from the National Cervical Screening Programme through faster and better access to information the real improvements will come when the primary screening for HPV occurs and again Dr Liz Craig outlined how that will break down a number of the access barriers for women. So we consider it absolutely appropriate that this bill would make the amendment to provide for the new definition of screening test" to include reference to the HPV test. So in conclusion I speak in support of this amendment and we look forward to the progress of this. Thank you."