Bidois DanDAN BIDOIS (National—Northcote): It's a pleasure to take a call on the second reading of the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Amendment Bill.I must confess I wasn't on the select committee so I wasn't privy to the discussions that went on or the deliberations. But I do want to certainly acknowledge the work that the Health Committee has been doing in this area. In particular I acknowledge the chair Louisa Wall and the Hon Dr David Clark for bringing this bill back to the House. Just having read the bill I must say it's a very good bill. It seems to make a lot of sense—common sense is a word that I've heard several times tonight. So I will not take too much time but I do want to just go through.Of course it's good to see this Government continue the work of the previous Government. We've had a number of reviews in this area—one in 2009 and then again in 2012. The 2012 review was very interesting. It looked at incentives in creating centres for health practitioners to maintain safe clinical practice. I think the purpose of this bill we've got unanimous agreement of—essentially ensuring that we maintain integrity of the system and that we hold our health practitioners to a high standard because that's certainly what the public of New Zealand deserve.So just going through the purpose of the bill it's certainly to make sure the health practitioners are competent and fit for purpose in their professions and in our modern healthcare system. Many of the amendments that we looked at in the previous two reviews come to the fore in this amendment bill—certainly around the concerns with practitioners and how to deal with concerns if the public have a concern about a health practitioner. There's now a process in place for them to raise that concern. There's certainly a sense of desire about improving collaboration and cooperation in the delivery of healthcare services and in terms of that as well.Thirdly that brings in the idea of independent reviews—so ensuring that health practitioners and any authority will be subject to independent reviews. Another thing that I think is really important is around data collection and sharing and this bill enables that as well.There are a couple of areas where in the previous reviews the general intent from the previous reviews has come through. Firstly on a number of issues—the first is around the responsibility for authorities' performance. So that comes through in this bill as well. There's far better visibility of decisions about the practitioners' practice and that can only be a good thing I think.The third is around the greater recognition of the importance of the interdisciplinary nature and collaboration of the health practitioner space and the other and final thing is around the information to the workforce as well.So I think it's a really good bill and just to kind of wrap up things it focuses on efficiency. There's a process for disciplining now in this bill health practitioners who aren't adhering to best practice. There's a process in place for suspending health practitioners and examining health practitioners that aren't living up to standard. And also finally it is around performance reviews of authorities and ensuring they are done in an independent manner as well.So once again I would like to say that this is a good bill. It makes a lot of sense. It's something that we're very proud to support on the side of the House. Thank you.