Chadwick Steve: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading 
Chadwick Steve: Injury Prevention Rehabilitation and Compensation Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading 
[Volume:625;Page:20165] 
STEVE CHADWICK (Labour—Rotorua) 
: 
 I am delighted to speak to this bill and I would like to personally congratulate the Hon Ruth Dyson as the Minister for ACC. This is the third bill on accident compensation that we have had since we came into Government in 1999 and it is beginning to reshape the whole of accident compensation to those Woodhouse founding principles that we really believed in. Those principles were about community responsibility through education and awareness of reduction of injury and comprehensive entitlement—and we mean comprehensive entitlement. I wonder whether the previous speaker who talked about the principle of choice of insurer is aware of the HIH debacle in Australia where insurance went belly-up and left people with no cover whatsoever. That is the risk that we are not prepared to take. 
Real compensation is a big issue for us. This bill starts to deal with the issues of real compensation and it does allow for administrative efficiency. The administrative efficiency forms around the principle where practitioners and claimants themselves used to have to talk about fault and “rare and severe” medical injuries. As constituent MPs we dealt with desperate accident compensation claimants who were waiting sometimes years until they achieved entitlement to accident compensation while they waited for reports from specialists and reports from hospital providers. The gap was simply too long and all of us felt that. This bill is now taking away the definition of “rare and severe” injury and replacing it with a definition of “treatment injury”. It is something that medical practitioners and public health service providers are absolutely delighted about. 
This result comes about as the Minister has said because of a very robust consultation phase. We talked to providers of health-care services. We talked to clinicians who found it particularly difficult and did feel that they were being punished for having to prove that they had not done anything wrong during a course of treatment. That requirement has gone now and with the no-fault approach and the treatment injury provision in this bill clinicians do not need to hide or duck for cover and they do not need to call Sedgwick’s Ltd or their indemnity insurers to seek advice about whether they should have admitted liability even though they knew that something catastrophic had happened with the outcome for a patient. Now they feel so much happier about this treatment injury provision. It takes away that punitive environment that prevailed in the health field. 
Peter Brown 
: For 5 years. 
STEVE CHADWICK 
: No—it was for at least 10 years because I used to deal with all the complaints against practitioners that came to our district health board or our Crown health enterprise. The poor old practitioners used to hide in fear. They used to bring their lawyer to a meeting when we were simply talking about what went wrong whether we could avoid it happening in the future and what we needed to do to systems and education in order to prevent that catastrophe happening again—even if it was something as simple as joining up anaesthetic systems so that they worked efficiently. We could not get practitioners to come to an environment that was legally safe and that did not lead through a pathway through the courts. Now there is an environment where they feel that they can participate in continuous improvement. That also links into the Health Practitioners Competence Assurance Act which was passed in 2003. This bill adds on to building an environment where clinicians feel that they are valued and that they can speak up quickly when an error occurs and where patients can receive due and appropriate compensation for their injury. 
This is a marvellous bill and as a select committee we all agreed on it. There were some minor technical amendments that we did not agree on. I was very happy to see a definition of “acupuncturist” come into this bill although other parties felt a bit differently about that. I thank those members on the Health Committee who know about health. Dr Paul Hutchison knows about that environment in which he used to have to practise and in which he was very nervous about anything going wrong and then wondering where to go to receive professional support as a practitioner. It was nice to have his support there and I thank the member. I thank the other members of the committee such as Heather Roy who also knows a lot about health systems management in this country. I think that we worked very well as a committee. I would also like to thank the committee clerk and supporters of our committee work which went very smoothly. 
The Supplementary Order Paper was released by the Minister very early so there were no surprises. That is how this Minister has dealt with accident compensation issues and injury prevention issues. I am sure that we will see more improvements made in the future so that we achieve a robust publicly funded system.